Amazing that in this day and age of smart phone technology and the proliferation of surveilance cameras in public spaces, cookies, browser histories, stored search queries and personalized search results, social media, etc… that people still harbour illusions of privacy.
You can insist all day long that you have a right to privacy and you’d be right. But in reality, that ship has sailed long ago.
The lock was cheap and not very sturdy so it’s your fault I read your diary.
Excellent work.
I understand the idea that if you are famous and attractive, someone will probably try to take your stuff or compromise your belongings or personal information at some point. For that reason it’s wise to protect yourself - but I also imagine it’s hard to live your life that way because you would probably end up feeling beseiged pretty quickly. And anyway we’ve seen hackers go to greater lengths than this to steal financial information and other things. The only person at fault here is the person who went and stole someone else’s property. Not the person who owned it or made it or did what they wanted in private with their own stuff and their own body. When something shitty happens to a famous person they don’t deserve more blame than anyone else.
If we are going to embrace the death of privacy, then as a culture we’d better radically revise what thoughts or conducts we consider worthy of adverse “consequences”. And even then I’m not sure we should give up the notion of controlling what is done with our own image. Sure, you can see some woman’s naked selfies… guess what she owns the copyright and you STILL may not disseminate them without her prior approval.
BUT laypeople have been lulled to believe it’s harder to access than it really is, by hardware sellers and service providers alike. I don’t see Apple or Google or Samsung loudly publicizing “please be aware this system will track you, and anything ever recorded on it may be dug up by someone savvy enough”. The casual consumers think they are locking their stuff in the trunk when they are really leaving it on the back seat with one door unlocked.
So if I don’t lock my 3rd floor windows, it’s legal for somebody to rent a ladder and steal my stuff? You’d think that would happen a lot sooner, too. We’ve had ladders for decades, at least.
If I could float like a balloon in and out of your window and take anything I could float away with, you wouldn’t be very safe leaving those windows unlocked. You wouldn’t see me, I wouldn’t leave any traces and you’d have no chance of catching me.
Stealing stuff via the net and hacking is a lot closer to catching such a ghost than a cat burglar. Hence the laws against it are pretty much ignored by anyone capable of doing it and with a desire to see Jennifer’s cootch shots.
And yet, Ethilrist would be completely within his rights to be upset at the ghost theft and also completely blameless that the theft happened.
When you rely on the illegality of something as your only shield, you make yourself the easiest target.
Knowing that there are criminals out there (who by definition are people who are choosing the break the law), there are “sensible” precautions that a person can take to make him/herself less likely to be the low-hanging fruit of victimization.
Whether or not “don’t send/store nude photos over the internet” is on the same level as “lock your car doors when you leave it parked,” well, I’m not sure. But, it’s certainly not an unreasonable position to take.
ETA: re: the word “blame.” This is a charged word, and kind of meaningless in this context. No one is saying “I blame the victim for the crime committed against him/her,” but again, if my car was robbed, and someone said, “well, maybe you should start locking your doors,” I don’t think they’d be wrong in suggesting that.
The FBI is on this case now. And the guy who hacked George W. Bush’s email and published his paintings was recently sentenced to four years in jail. Granted his crimes also involved political figures so there are some additional implications, but with more and more people putting all kinds of personal stuff online, this is something the police and intelligence agencies really have to take seriously.
And if the photos were stored in a personal account and protected by a password, illegality wasn’t the only shield.
The guy that hacked Scarlett Johanssan’s account is doing 10 years. And IIRC, the person that hacked Palin’s email was caught as well. And of course Rupert Murdoch’s phone hacking thing was discovered.
So these “ghosts” do seem pretty catchable (bustable?).
Meh.
“Don’t do (act considered sexually provocative at that time and culture) unless you are willing to accept (act of sexual violation)” is a construction as old as dirt. And it’s one that hasn’t done jack to make anyone safer despite being popular everywhere from Taliban Afghanistan to your local bar.
What makes women safer is giving victims a voice, having law enforcement and other institutions take it seriously, stamping out the “boys will be boys” attitude whenever it turns up and educating people about acceptable boundaries and why consent really is a big deal.
This isn’t a magic bullet. Nothing stops all crime. But a quick look at history shows it works a lot better than slut shaming and victim blaming.
Sure, but maybe password protection is not effective protection at all. Or maybe it is. I don’t know the answer to that. My assumption is that my passwords keep the woman at the next desk over from logging into the stuff on my computer when I’m not here, but beyond that, I really have no concept of how reliable a password is on any given site for keeping my info private.
Whether or not password protection is an effective precaution against general, run-of-the-mill cyber crime is a worthwhile question. And, if the answer is “no,” then we should shout that from the rooftops and tell everybody to not leave their expensive stuff in the car if the locks don’t work.
I can’t answer that, but I think the answer to your question would be pretty complicated. Regardless, it sounds like these photos were protected and nobody relied on illegality as their sole defense. Now we’re discussing whether they were protected enough, which is a whole different issue. The thieves may have exploited a flaw in an app to get the photos. If the people who had their privacy violated here - it’s not just Jennifer Lawrence - were victimized because they used a product with a flaw they had no reasonable way of knowing about and no ability to correct, I don’t see how they can be faulted. But again, in having that discussion we’re on the thieves’ turf. Their belief is that if they can get your stuff, it’s your fault. You can’t counter that presumption by arguing about the details of the security of these photos. You have to go after the presumption itself.
I’m not in the shaming and blaming camp.
I do think personal, provocative and intimate writings/images are in a different category from most possessions. Twisting the argument to say that people shouldn’t have anything of value because it could be stolen is just absurdist nonsense.
If you’re going to write, paint, pose for or selfie something that would be compromising and damaging in any ‘wrong’ hands, you have to question both the motives for creating it and the expectations of how reality is going to handle it. It doesn’t have to be salacious or involve a young, attractive woman or have anything to do with sex - that’s where I see this discussion going off the rails. It’s not about privacy in any ordinary sense or an expectation of personal security in any ordinary sense or about rape culture or objectifying women… it’s about not putting personally compromising things where they have a high probability of being discovered, and unless you have Obama’s customized Blackberry, your phone and cloud storage and network-accessible files are pretty flimsy hiding places.
Forget about Jennifer Lawrence or nude photos or even phone hacking… suppose the CEO of a Fortune 500 company feels compelled to write something about a really disturbing personal event - perhaps nothing even slightly illegal. Something that will effectively end his career if it’s known. Is it wise for him to send it in email, store it in public cloud storage or keep it on a phone he carries around and might lose? Or is it better to have never written it down at all - or at least not in any but the most secure possible way?
That is: yay for J. Lawrence and all those liberated enough to email nude photos to their BFFs. But they get to take their turn in the stupid hat for not being appropriately cautious about such damaging and personal materials, be they wet cooch shots, a forged contract or an admission of a serious felony no one knew about.
Why is that?
Then I think you need to explain where the line is.
Again: why? Why are her motives in taking these pictures at all relevant and why do they need to be scrutinized? If you mean she had to make a choice to take the photos - yes, of course she did. But since there’s nothing illegal or immoral about that, I don’t think there’s anything to debate. And while it’s a smart thing to protect your valuables and important possessions, it doesn’t mean that someone is blameworthy if they don’t take every conceivable step to protect themselves. And these discussions usually go that way.
And yet it does. When George W. Bush’s emails got hacked, did anybody say “He should’ve known better than to do those paintings?” I don’t think so. Apart from all the jokes about Bush himself and his artistic ability, I think it was generally acknowledged that the hacker had done something wrong by breaking into Bush’s emails. But good looking young women are treated as an attractive nuisance (sorry). They’re supposed to know that people are going to go above and beyond the bounds of sanity to see them naked because it’s a sport, and because they dared to do what they wanted, they get some of the blame for making themselves targets.
I’m not sure it’s a good comparison, but I do think people would sing a different tune if that happened.
I think for the same reason that if you don’t want anyone to know your secret, don’t tell anyone. If you do tell someone, you accept the risk that comes along with it. Those are the realities of this world.
So, if you have naked selfies and you’ve shared them with your S.O., you may have taken every precaution to safeguard them but your S.O. is not under such obligation and can very well make them public after you break up. That’s not illegal, AFAIK. Asshole-ish. But not illegal.
My argument supposes a slightly better world, not a perfect one. Your argument, apparently, is that no one should bother addressing this specific flaw because . . . ?
Bullshit. If this were a so-called “eternal verity”, then it would have read “no person”, not no young woman. The reason Emily Post warned young women was because any damage to their reputation meant they could no longer secure a husband. That damage to the reputation was, in nearly every instance, some inference that the woman in question was not sexually pure. These are not values that exist in a meaningful way today, and any adult can point to emails, texts, and notes they’d rather not have read in front of their family, because - guess what - communication intended for one party may not be appropriate for another.
In Post’s day, a woman would have been condemned for allowing pictures to be taken of her. Today, you condemn the victims of this violation of privacy because while it’s okay to take pictures, if you somehow “allow” someone to use these images without your permission, you get what’s coming to you. Never mind that it was done without the person’s consent. Never mind that this was not a matter of negligence on the victim’s part. Blame the victim for something that is categorically not their fault.
That’s true of any possession or any secret. What special category are “personal, provocative and intimate writings/images” in?