14 DAY TRIAL // Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past week, you should know by now that a massive number of nude celebrity pics have landed on the Internet. In light of the massive invasion of privacy that occurred, there’s been a lot of talk about how people shouldn’t really trust cloud services.
Of course, that’s the same discussion we’ve been having ever since the NSA scandal began over a year ago, when it was revealed that cloud storage services were among the many targets of the intelligence agency.
Staying safe while on the Internet has become a challenge, and it’s not just because of the National Security Agency, however ironic it is to fit the name in the phrase. Hackers, jealous exes and entirely too-curious neighbors and friends can pose a risk to the safety of the private content belonging to anyone, whether that person’s a celebrity or not.
I’ve heard and read countless times over the past few days that all these actresses and celebrities should have been smarter than to keep naked pictures of themselves in the cloud since “everyone knows how unsafe those are.”
For starters, no, not everyone knows that cloud storage isn’t safe, and that’s because, under normal circumstances, it is quite secure. If you’re a regular person, chances are that no one will try to break into your account to check out whatever pictures you have stored there.
What happened to Jennifer Lawrence, Ariana Grande and the rest of the 100 women on the list isn’t the result of some information leak that by some kind of magic included these people, and it’s not a widespread attack where hackers got data by the bulk and managed to track down content belonging to famous people.
This was a targeted attack, where these women’s accounts were broken into, not a random happening. It’s exactly as if their houses were watched for a while, their habits learned, their houses broken into and their valuable and private items stolen from that “secret” place that everyone knows about from under the bed.
There’s also been a lot of talk about how important two-step verification is and how people should pick better security questions and more complicated answers. I’m not even going to say just how many characters the password should have, with capital letters, numbers, dashes, hashtags, and exclamation points.
This is true for all online accounts and for everyone in the world, but it’s not going to keep a dedicated hacker away from content too long. While this is quite unfortunate, it doesn’t mean that we should run away in fear and never power up the computer anymore or open the phone. Living in fear, even in fear of hacking, is no way of living.
Cloud storage and online services in general are as safe as they can be, and many attacks are taken care of before they can do too much damage. Sure, adding more security is always desirable, but it wouldn’t solve all the problems under the moon. Ultimately, there was the argument that they shouldn’t have taken such pictures in the first place if they were going to back them up on the Internet. The fact that these were taken in the privacy of their own houses seems to have no weight in the discussion.
What this all adds up to, however, is more serious than the fact that some nude photos have landed online. While embarrassing, the issues at hand are more delicate and reflect the state of today’s society, where women are blamed for everything under the moon when, in fact, they are the victims.
Saying that they should have known better than to upload pictures to the cloud is a form of victim blaming. Saying that they should have set up more security layers is a form of victim blaming. Saying that they shouldn’t have taken nude pictures is a form of victim blaming.
As Lena Dunham, whose pictures also landed online, put it, “The ‘don’t take naked pics if you don’t want them online’ argument is the ‘she was wearing a short skirt’ of the web.”
This is just a variation of how women and girls everywhere are being blamed for the assaults they suffer, whether sexual or not, while the perpetrators are somehow forgotten as spirits flare up.
It’s not these women’s fault that they took the pictures, that they got uploaded to their private clouds or that they were hacked. The blame sits squarely on the shoulders of the men who thought that it would be fun to expose the intimate lives of these women.