Stolen naked pictures and videos being posted on the Internet isn’t a new story. We have seen it before and, while the players always change (today it’s Kate Upton and Jennifer Lawrence, last year it was Scarlett Johansson) and some of the specifics vary (the sheer volume of this particular breach was astounding), the game stays the same. People are just prudish and hypocrite as if it was not happening before. Every time a naked woman’s Selfie gets stolen and published and the woman in question is super bummed about it, the Internet responds the same way: “If you don’t want people to see you naked, don’t take naked pictures”.
Rich celebrities are making money off putting their bodies on display and building personality cults around themselves, so as to demand millions of dollars in payment from the studios exactly because people want to see their bodies on the screen. They build up and profit off demand for sexualized depictions of their bodies. Why is all the drama? Kate Upton is posing topless in bed in Sam Edelman campaign. The blonde also posed on a luxurious bed completely nude, save for an oversized chain necklace, in one of her past shots. So, maybe she and some other celebs actually want us to see them naked?
And if not, it’s still astounding how many people just don’t know their phones upload to cloud, like they don’t know they’re consenting to information sharing when they use apps. Sure, it’s in the fine print. Of course celebrities have to go to more extreme security measures than anonymous people. Famous people have always been targets. I remember reading in Rolling Stone that Taylor Swift has a guard on-duty outside her building 24/7. Regular people don’t need that, and how long do you think she’d survive without it? Several percent of humanity are literally crazy, and some of them are dangerous.
So, yes, if you’re a rich celebrity target, you need an Internet security consultant before you go putting confidential stuff on your phone. Why should that be any different from all the other forms of security you have?
However, stuff happens to celebrities just like the rest of us, and they need to just deal with it just like the rest of us. They don’t deserve any special investigation or all this ridiculous press. Again, I don’t blame the celebrities, but enough instances of hacks have occurred that the celebrities should know their data is not safe. If the celebrities does not understand their nude photos are a commodity, then they are living under a rock.
I think this was simply a blind-spot, encouraged by our industry in-general, and Apple specifically. I feel for the victims, and am optimistic the hackers will be caught and punished… but I suspect that Jennifer Lawrence password was something dumb, and all her security question answers were things that could be easily Googled about her. I’d also bet not one of the victims had turned on two-factor authentication, despite most of the cloud companies practically begging us to. Get lazy with your privacy these days, and someone will get you. They start with the rich and famous, but they’ll get around to us, too.
It has happened before and it will happen again: a bunch of female entertainers or their partners have their private photos hacked and the sexual ones posted online. Don’t store your sensitive stuff in the cloud. The public (and even less educated celebrities) need to understand how vulnerable most infrastructure is. So, this is a good wake up call for everyone to not store anything sensitive on public infrastructure. While it’s forbidden and illegal to steal, people and celebrities are way too lax with their online data. Period.
