I feel like this is a trick question, but I’m not sure. It appears to contain its own answer.
Right, the only people “blaming” the celebrities are misogynist jerks and men who are just now realizing that Katniss/the blonde chick from American Hustle has boobs.
This would have been a tad more believable had it not been followed by several paragraphs of shaming and blaming.
See Amateur Barbarian’s last post.
I did, and assume that “personal, provocative and intimate” is the category.
The hyperfocus on “blame” always seems to push these discussions into emotionally charged and ultimately pointless talking-past-each-other, and this thread is unfortunately no exception.
I guess I’m just confused about which part of personal provocative and intimate means, go ahead and steal it.
There’s an example.
But the stuff Amateur Barbarian said about personal and provocative stuff is true of absolutely anything. If I had nude photos of myself, I’d be upset if someone stole them. If I had an expensive luxury car, I’d be upset if someone stole it. If I had a blank notepad sitting on my desk, I’d be upset if someone stole it. I’d take sensible precautions to protect any of those things based on their value to me. But based on what Amateur Barbarian is saying, if someone steals my car or my pad, nobody’s going to argue about my motives in having those things or the steps I took to protect them. With the photos, though, all bets are off. You can argue about my motives, my character, or the fact that I should have known better than to take them or to store them even if they were password protected and I paid a company to take care of them and they failed because of an error on their end. That’s unreasonable.
What’s wonderful about all this is that celebrities get sneered at all the time for being fake and having a public persona that is inauthentic, manufactured, plastic, commercialized, and so on. I bet infinity million dollars there’s a post on this board where the OP of this thread does that.
Then their sexts get stolen and published and we say they shouldn’t have ever done anything in private that they didn’t want everyone to know about.
He said, working very hard at being droll without actually contributing.
Sorry if someone else pointed this out, but in case they didn’t… the thread title seems to imply that - at least if you’re hot and famous - taking naked pictures of yourself and storing them in private is similar to publishing them in a porno magazine. That’s creepy.
I personally don’t give a damn about anyone’s nude photos or homemade porn, but I don’t think it’s out of the question to consider the different levels of risk and consequence for things that can be stolen and disseminated, particularly electronic media, which are that much easier to steal remotely. Cars are insured, bank accounts can be closed. Someone mentioned medical records, which is probably the nearest comparison, but I don’t think there’s a huge public demand for the details of Jennifer Lawrence’s colonoscopy, let alone yours or mine. But everybody wants to see nudie pics, especially of famous people, and once they’re out, they’re out. You can’t close the naked selfie account and open a new one. Depending on your position in the community, the impact may range from embarrassing to devastating. Yes, the hackers/thieves are to blame for the misery they cause. Acknowledging this fact, even repeatedly, doesn’t undo the damage.
Higher risk, higher consequence, demands higher vigilance. Whether that means hiding your Polaroids in a safe, or using client-side encryption, or forcing Apple/DropBox/whoever to make safeguards part of the infrastructure (IMO the preferred solution) is up for discussion. But we can’t even have the discussion, because it immediately gets derailed into shrill squabbling about where the blame lies. With our current technology, it is risky to take nude photos/video with a mobile phone, however easy and tempting, and it isn’t victim-blaming to want everyone to be aware of that before they do it.
What’s “the discussion,” exactly? Everyone in the world knows that if you don’t take naked pictures of yourself, people can’t look at them. It’s not “shrill squabbling” to point out, in response to somebody starting a message board thread to shake his fucking finger at celebrities, that it is an acceptable and reasonable thing to do if they take pictures of themselves despite the fact that if they’re stolen, people will be able to use their eyes to see them.
Is there anything we shouldn’t consider the levels of risk and consequence for? This isn’t false or wrong, but it’s a platitude. Some things are riskier than others. Everybody knows this.
Neither does telling people “You shouldn’t have done that.”
We have the “discussion” every goddamn time this happens. What’s happening is that you’re seeing people are getting sick of the “discussion,” which always takes responsibility away from criminals and jerks and puts it on their victims. If you want to offer security tips, by all means offer security tips. I am sure there is an audience for it. If you want to offer vague warnings like “be careful” and obvious crap like
Then you’re not doing anything except mocking and patronizing people who’ve just suffered an appalling invasion of their privacy.
I propose an alternate law - based on a statement made in the Hit Man series - call it the Hit Man law: from now on, just assume that anything using or connected to electronic networks can be compromised, if someone is sufficiently motivated.
In the Hit Man series, the protagonist was a killer for money who avoided, as a matter of course, using cellphones and computers in his “work” because “anyone can do anything” - that is, unless you are an IT expert with encryption up the wazoo (and maybe even then), you cannot be sure that someone can’t get at your information or other evidence.
Now, obviously, this is advice given by a criminal on how to avoid leaving evidence for the authorities, but the same goes for any information the loss of which is “non compensible” by money damages - even if the owners of the info are doing nothing whatsoever that is morally or criminally wrong.
For example, it is equally true that hackers could get ahold of your banking or credit card info - and they sometimes do: my credit card was “hacked” and used by scammers. But if they do, you can (usually) get your money back (and I did). It is different with (for example) nude pics of celebrities. They can (and I maybe will) sue Apple for negligence in storing their info; the cops can (and hopefully will) arrest the criminals who hacked it; but the pics will still be out on the 'net forever.
I guess the objection could be raised that the proposed Hit Man law is so obvious that it doesn’t need stating, but I think it isn’t really obvious at all, at least not to the average person: for example, some at least of the current victims had “erased” their pics from their devices and had assumed that this made the pics dissapear forever. With modern electronic devices, that assumption is not safe.
And yet I remain entirely sympathetic to the victims and blame only the people who stole their data.
OK. So Hit Man was paranoid and didn’t use computers.
And then Ariana Grande used her iPhone to take pictures of whatever the fuck. And somebody did some NSA shit and stole the pictures, whether they were deleted or I don’t know what. Maybe she thought that the risk that somebody was going to do some NSA shit was low enough in comparison to the fun of taking the pictures that it was an acceptable risk.
Then somebody did whatever the people did, and now you can see her pictures. What’s the law? She’s not allowed to be angry?
Certainly. As I stated, this point isn’t an obvious one to the average device user - it is only slowly becomming obvious, exactly because of incidents like this.
I saw another example of the “anyone can do anything” with electronic devices attached to a network principle at work the other day (again in the criminal realm): a murderer answered his cell phone while burying the body of his victim; later, claimed as an alibi that he was in another state at the time of the killing. The authorities were able to “triangulate” the approximate location of his cellphone by what cell towers it accessed, and he was busted.
I had no idea they could do that - and obviously, neither did the murderer.
No, she has every right to be angry. And, as I said in my post, every right to sue the storer with negligence, and the cops have every right to arrest and prosecute the hackers.
The notion is that what would appear at first sight as unreasonable “paranoia” dreamed up for a fictional assassin character is fast turning into “reality” - that stuff stored in electronic form is going to be accessible to anyone with enough motivation.
I’m not saying this is an issue of blame. Nobody is to blame if they are the victim of a crime, be it rape, murder, theft, or cell phone hacking. The criminal is the person who is to blame for the crime.
But that said, crimes happen. Saying you’re not to blame for a crime does nothing to make you immune to a crime. Pointing out ways in which people can reduce the chances of being a crime victim is common sense not finger pointing.