Any cite for where women requested “dick pics” from Weiner? Just not my area of experience, but do women actually request these things? I thought most dick pics that are generally sent are “unsolicited”.
Not sure if you’re just joking about the decision to reciprocate sexy texts and provocative photos with junk shots, as distinct from something a little more classy. In that sense, maybe most dick pics are “unsolicited” in that the women in question would have preferred something a little more coy or whole-body-focused.
But if the question is whether he just sent all these women naked photos out of the blue like a vacuum salesman going door-to-door, the answer is no, for at least some of the women. They sent him naked photos, had sexually explicit chats, etc., as part of the implicit relationship I was describing. At least one of them claimed to be the initiator of this–though I don’t think that really matters, since in at least some of the others the penis pictures were part of larger consensual sharing of naked pictures and explicit texts.
By this “logic”, we should empathize with somebody who kills his parents and pleads for clemency on the grounds that he’s an orphan.
I’m not sure what you mean celebrities should do then, they should just expect their privacy to be violated? Should they not have any private pictures, because any of them could be stolen? Or what about private emails? I know you don’t mean to be victim-blaming, but I don’t know what you expect from celebrities.
Also, did Lawrence and the other celebrities purposely upload the pictures? They might have thought they were just on their phones. I don’t know have an iphone so I don’t know what the automatic settings are. I’ve heard of people who didn’t realize that their photos were automatically uploaded to the cloud. I believe the recent movie called Sex Tape with Cameron Diaz and Jason Segel is about them not realizing their video is automatically saved to the cloud. Maybe they need to understand their devices and security setting better, but you could probably say that about 95% of Americans.
If I’m remembering correctly, he also claimed at first that the picture uploaded on Twitter wasn’t him, that it was a hacker, and then later admitted it was him. He pretty much handled everything in the wrong way.
I think if Weiner had been sending sexts to his wife and they were released because he was hacked or he accidentally posted them on Twitter, he wouldn’t have needed to resign. Or if even he was a single man corresponding with an age-appropriate woman he was dating. The issue was that he was a married man sexting multiple younger women, who initially lied about it.
Honestly, we should all be thanking the hackers for exposing Apple’s lax security and the folly of the cloud.
Just how much weight do we want to put on implicit trust? If someone told Wiener “If you send me dirty pictures I’ll keep them private”, and then shared them, then I agree that Wiener is a victim. If Wiener sent them to his wife and she shared them, then again, he’s a victim. But if he’s just sending them to random women he met on the Internet, then how much trust should he be expecting?
If I buy a used car from a sketchy-looking dude on Craigslist and it turns out to be a lemon, I’m no less a victim than if I buy a lemon from the local dealership. The fact that I could have taken more measures to avoid my victimhood doesn’t change that.
I would think the question is just whether there is or is not an implicit agreement not to share them. And I think there pretty clearly is such an agreement at least when the interaction is something more than just spamming girls with pictures.
Really? With “random women he met on the Internet”?
Yes, really. Like all social customs, this is somewhat arbitrary and I don’t have a good way to prove it. But my understanding of the customary arrangement is that if we sexy chat and exchange sexy pictures–regardless of whether we have any other relationship–you are not to publish those pictures.
Whether that expectation is realistic or not is another matter, of course, just like the expectation of buying a used car with no unrevealed defects on Craigslist.
There must be some sort of “code” about internet sexting that I missed when I first heard about it.
Yes, of course there is. Isn’t that true for pretty much all intimate interaction among humans–from picking up dates at a bar to appropriate preparations for an anniversary? Why would sexting be any different? Because it’s salacious?
Sounds like that old saying that you aren’t really paying the hooker for sex, you’re paying her to not tell your wife.
The woman (women?) who released the Weiner photos had a right to those photos - he gave them to her. At that point, it may be a breach of trust for her to share those photos publicly, but it isn’t illegal.
If the photos of J-Law had been leaked by an ex-boyfriend who owned them, that would be a betrayal but not a crime. But these photos were apparently stolen from her and released by someone to whom they did not belong. I see a big difference there.
There’s also the mitigating factor that Weiner was married, so his photo sharing was a betrayal of his marriage vows - he was guilty of being creepy before the photos were even released. There is nothing seedy or inappropriate about J-Law’s pictures.
Yes, it is. You care defining it too narrowly. Consider the California law which seeks to criminalize revenge porn. The wording is as follows:
Certainly applies. The law wouldn’t in that case because of some minor technicalities, but the term is used to describe when people, usually former partners, publish intimate photos to shame people.
I am not solely talking about that one photo. Even if we grant that that particular photo was shared widely, that doesn’t address the issue that subsequently viewing a photo intended to be private is regarded as being a violation. If he had accidently posted his credit card info or SSN, does it make it okay for people to repost it knowing it will open him up to identity theft? Why are the people viewing the Weiner photos viewed less harshly than people who viewed Lawrence’s?
Why is it poor judgement beyond the fact that it blew up in his face? Why is it unhealthy to sext with another adult?
There was (IMO incorrect) speculation that these photos were intentionally leaked. That doesn’t change the privacy concerns.
Why? Espeically in the Hilton case where other videos were actually stolen during a burglary.
The method of transmission and the means by which the images/videos were obtained are different. But the privacy concerns, and the foreseeability of a person in both cases to recognize the lack of absolute privacy, are very similar.
The same applies to the Lawrence photos as well. Are you really asserting that basic privacy only extends to interactions under which the participants are contractually obligated?
But that scenario you described didn’t happen as far as we know.
No, all you have to do in either case is Google it. That’s what you are missing. Is the criminality involved in the release of Lawrence’s photos more legally troubling? Sure. But once the horse leaves the barn, there is nothing much that can be done in either case. What I find odd is that people who actively search for Lawrence’s photos are considered creeps who are actively victimizing her, but people who do the same with Weiner’s photos are not judged very harshly by most.
Additionally, there is the issue that the I-cloud photos released were not released by the hacker, but rather by someone who supposedly bought and aggregated them. How is that person any different from Sydney Leathers? Would that guy be welcomed on TV like she was?
Really? If I send you my SSN, is it yours to do what you want with? What about any other personal information you happen to come across? Doesn’t morality enter into this for you at any point?
Which can be said for Weiner too. He sends the to a limited number of “authorized viewers”. Then others who were not authorized to have the pictures got a hold of them. If the issue is unauthorized viewing of pictures, why does it matter how they were obtained by an intermediary? Why isn’t it enough that the person in the picture doesn’t want you to see them? Why is it okay for people to view Weiner’s pics and not Lawrence’s?
Again, the same applies. In this case Leathers is replaced by Apple. There is no way around the fact that many of these people seem to have “shared” these photos with Apple, which then allowed them to be stolen because of lax security. Why is sharing a photo with someone who turns out to be a scumbag more of a moral failing then uploading them to the cloud? The latter seems more naive to me.
Please explain what the hell you are talking about?
Sharing with Apple is not remotely like sharing them with a person. I am under a pretty strong belief that when I upload pictures to the cloud, no human being at Apple is looking at the pictures–is this incorrect?
If I’m right, uploading them to the cloud is in no meaningful sense sharing them with someone, any more than putting my belongings in the locker at the gym is sharing my belongings with the gym owners.
Your analogy falls apart here.
I hesitate to wade into this debate, as I don’t really post in Great Debates all that often. But I just wonder if this statement is true, legally speaking.
I’m thinking of Salinger v. Random House, which dealt with the use of J.D. Salinger’s unpublished letters in a biography. That case held that an author retains copyright in his unpublished letters, and they may not be published without his permission, either by the recipients, by libraries the recipients donated them to, or by scholars using those libraries.
Please understand that I have no particular sympathy for Anthony Weiner, and every sympathy for those celebrities whose privacy has been grossly violated in this instance. And I am not a lawyer, so I welcome correction by any attorneys who know more about this than I do. And of course I realize that there is a vast difference between a letter from J.D. Salinger to Learned Hand, and a cell phone picture of Anthony Weiner’s dick. None of that is in dispute.
But it does seem, to my layman’s eyes, that the spirit of the Court’s decision in this case argues against the idea that “Once you send it to me, I can do whatever I want with it.”
Seriously? These 2 statements are not related. Millions of people are sexting right now. No one cares.
It was poor judgement because as even sven stated multiple extramarital affairs are generally regarded by the public as a sign of poor judgement in a politician. Granted this is a relatively recent, US-only phenomena, but a real one. If you as a politician can’t play the game by the generally acknowledged rules, you’re out. Weiner was out. It doesn’t help that he came across as a sexual hedonist with predatory tendencies.
The only image that was significant in his story at all was the one he posted HIMSELF and then lied about. Repeatedly. He forced that story into prominence by his ridiculous posturing and spinning. Should those women have shared other pictures? Even if none of them did, the damage was done once the women themselves were found.
You keep trying to say that Weiner’s experience is similar to the Apple celebrity hack and they simply aren’t. The more the thread goes on, the clearer that is.
Yes. It’s only technically correct insomuch as someone from Apple, or the NSA, or a hacker generally has no desire to view your documents. However, they certainly can, and I would be shocked if such a thing never happened. The same cannot be said for a famous person. Clearly, that is wrong, but it is also reality. We live in a world where paparazzi sit in people’s bushes for hours hoping to catch a picture of the baby of a celebrity. They do that because is a demand and a market for these things. Accordingly, no celebrity should have the mistaken impression that Apple’s cloud (or any other cloud) isn’t subject to scumbags attempting to profit form this market.
It is sharing (eg. willingly providing someone else with a copy) them in a technical sense. The point is that these files now exist on a server, or multiple servers, over which you have no direct control. That is where the vulnerability existed here. As this article states:
Or, look at the icloud user agreement:
There is absolutely no more reason to trust a stranger on the internet as there is a large corporation with your privacy when you are a famous person uploading information or content that has great value to the public. In my mind, a closer analogy using your framework would be a famously wealthy guy putting his bag full of $100 bills in an unlocked locker, then being shocked if it was stolen. Doesn’t excuse the actions of the thief, but it does make the theft foreseeable.