The Great Celebrity Naked Photo Leak- Does It Bother You?

[Frankly Rich]

Are you bothered about the Great Celebrity Naked Photo leak? The media is already capitalizing it, naming it, discussing it.We are told that we are victimizing women each time we click on Kate Upton's vagina. If suggested that she herself put the photos on her phone, the response is that we are now using an updated version of the "short skirt" argument- to wit, a woman shouldn't be raped just because she wears a short skirt.

 

So what should we think, or, more importantly, what do you think? I was wondering where all the photos of nude guys are. Boytoy.com saved me on that as it turns out a minor celebrity sent a video of himself dropping trou to a fan. Of course, he had a lot to show and didn't seem abashed when it leaked. "Now you know what it looks like," he said.

 

Should the women take the same approach? Or is their wrath giving the story more air time? More clicks on pix? One gets the feeling that in this day where every emotion of any celebrity has been worked out in a focus group, that here is genuine outrage. Privacy has definitely been breached, but haven't we all pretty much waived that right anyway? Who believes the government didn't have those photos first? Well, they did, as we learned recently that NSA employees passed them around to relieve the boredom of listening to my conversations. (Your too, so don't get smug!)

 

I've waited until last to give my opinion, fearful as I am of coloring yours. But, if you give yours, I'll give mine. Not so rare these days, is it? And, for the record, there are no-I repeat no- photos or videos of me naked anywhere on the internet. Thankful replies from all sides on that one.

[Nvr2Thick]

I recall when a nude photo leak meant that someone became famous and then cheap nude modeling photos from years past surfaced. The photographer with the rights to the pictures and the magazine with the winning bid were both portrayed as opportunistic sleazes, but the model was publicly shamed as well. With all of the Internet's sources of instant media this all now happens at the speed of a tweet. When first black Miss America Vanessa Williams' nude photos were published it was a major controversy. It took a long time for the image to fade from memory even though a small subset of the population actually saw the pictures in Penthouse. Now we get to hear about a celebrity's pics as they're exposed to the Internet. Everyone has access, few people really care for more than a day or two, and the pictures are around forever.

 

Standards for decency erode over time regardless. Nothing is as shocking as it once was. The Internet has turned every event big or small into a news item, which means that everything and nothing is really newsworthy. We're also seeing that with cameras and picture repositories on every computer and mobile device, along with instant worldwide distribution privacy is becoming a thing of the past.

 

Are these people victimized? Of course, but it's getting to be a common form of victimization -- kind of like the way paparazzi incessantly hound celebrities. These infractions can be debated, but they'll continue and escalate regardless.

 

My parents always told me that if I was caught in a bad situation I had to account for my own actions. Was I hanging out with the wrong people, in the wrong place, or as a bystander to questionable acts? What could I have done to avoid the situation, or what did I do to contribute to my downfall? You might think that the last 500 Internet photo leaks would serve as cautionary examples. Anyone with something to lose would think -- If I trust my nude photos to my phone, my boyfriend, my hookup, my bff, my stalkee... what's the worst thing likely to happen? In spite of countless cautionary tales so many people never learn, so no, I don't really care.

[Guy Fawkes]

Let's turn it around. If someone took a picture of me strolling around bare ass naked at Helios and posted it on the internet, how would I react?

 

I would track them down and make them regret the action. Not because I was ashamed but because they violated my expectation of privacy.

 

Just because your pants are split up the back in public doesn't give me the right to loudly point it out to the crowd. What I would do is to quietly ask them if they could use the tread and needle that I have tucked away in my purse.

 

Just because someone is a celebrity doesn't mean that they lose their expectation of privacy. Sure, let's make sure that the criminals that broke the law get send to jail. However, we need to send a clear and unmistakeable message to the media that they should respect all peoples privacy.

[Nvr2Thick]

Let's turn it around. If someone took a picture of me strolling around bare ass naked at Helios and posted it on the internet, how would I react?

 

I would track them down and make them regret the action. Not because I was ashamed but because they violated my expectation of privacy.

 

Just because your pants are split up the back in public doesn't give me the right to loudly point it out to the crowd. What I would do is to quietly ask them if they could use the tread and needle that I have tucked away in my purse.

 

Just because someone is a celebrity doesn't mean that they lose their expectation of privacy. Sure, let's make sure that the criminals that broke the law get send to jail. However, we need to send a clear and unmistakeable message to the media that they should respect all peoples privacy.

 

I don't think they lost their expectation of privacy because they're celebrities; they lost much of their expectation of privacy because it's 2014. Standards have eroded, and technology is making privacy harder to protect. Bob Guccione doesn't have to buy your pictures and pay to publish them; all someone has to do is reTweet or post them and wait for them to go viral.

 

Tracking people down and making them regret the action is becoming an ambiguous action. Futile too -- sue and the act of suing makes the news on hundreds of news portals, reposting your pic but with a pixelated ass (and encouragement to Google an uncensored copy). People can try to send a message to the media, but that war was lost years ago.

[Frankly Rich]

I lament the loss of privacy these days. We seem to be happy to give it up, and businesses and the government are just jolly helpers in seeing that we do. So, yes, I am bothered by this unwilling release of naked photos. The public has no need to see them and the celebrities have every right to keep them private. Where are we going to draw the line?

[Steven_Draker]

http://images.nymag.com/news/frank-rich/frankrich130701_privacy_560.jpg

 

"I want you to respect my privacy."

[Diverdan]

Thanks, Steven.... me thinks that some protest too much.... but I also agree with Daddy's comments...

[Frankly Rich]

Amusing as Steven's photo is, it's hardly apropos to the situation where people stored private pix with the expectation that only they could access them.

[armadillo]

"Apparently the only person entitled to privacy in America is a police officer who shot an unarmed teenager."

[jawjateck]

Every day, I live with the fear that the secret video of me doing one of our well-known companions will be posted for the world to see. Quite the scandal....this would be.....

[Phil_musc]

Every day, I live with the fear that the secret video of me doing one of our well-known companions will be posted for the world to see. Quite the scandal....this would be.....

 

Gosh, jawja, was that you??!! I had no idea that you were that hot. And with technique to spare!

[Steven_Draker]

Amusing as Steven's photo is, it's hardly apropos to the situation where people stored private pix with the expectation that only they could access them.

 

I'm wondering at what degree these expectations are real?

 

If you don't want any "revealing" or "compromising" material about you floating around, you shouldn't be taking these pictures and shooting these videos in the first place.

 

I think that if you upload something on the Internet or in the Cloud, there are chances that it's not "private" anymore.

 

http://favim.com/orig/201109/03/birds-cage-cute-fly-Favim.com-136694.jpg

[adriano46]

I'm wondering at what degree these expectations are real?

 

If you don't want any "revealing" or "compromising" material about you floating around, you shouldn't be taking these pictures and shooting these videos in the first place.

 

I think that if you upload something on the Internet or in the Cloud, there are chances that it's not "private" anymore.

 

http://favim.com/orig/201109/03/birds-cage-cute-fly-Favim.com-136694.jpg

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EXACTLY! Karma bites back again.

[jawjateck]

Gosh, jawja, was that you??!! I had no idea that you were that hot. And with technique to spare!

 

Did you like how I put that "top" stud on his knees and pounded him from behind....doggy style?

 

Some of these guys' public reps don't match reality.

[Steven_Draker]

Does shooting amateur porn in Oklahoma comes with "privacy" protection?

[+ Funguy]

I'm wondering at what degree these expectations are real?

 

If you don't want any "revealing" or "compromising" material about you floating around, you shouldn't be taking these pictures and shooting these videos in the first place.

 

I think that if you upload something on the Internet or in the Cloud, there are chances that it's not "private" anymore.

 

http://favim.com/orig/201109/03/birds-cage-cute-fly-Favim.com-136694.jpg

[/color]

 

We all already know that there is a big risk of "private" pix going public. If you take those pix/videos and store them in a place where they are accessible to other people (with or without permission) you KNOW they will surface somewhere. If you slyly want that to happen, fine.

 

In this day and age, with computer abilities as they are, I honestly DON'T think there should be an "expectation" of privacy with info of this sort. We can "want" privacy but if we "need" privacy, you are not going to have it on a friggin' cellphone or iPad.

 

Just like if you browse with your computer set to incognito, the average "Joe" is not going to be able to pull up your history. The Chinese, Russians, the NSA, and your 16 year old nerdy nephew on the other hand…...

[Boink]

As someone who has always loved my MacBook, I never felt a need for an iPad. I take pictures with my camera; my phone is a phone. 'The Cloud' sounded like a bad idea to me from the get go. So glad I never signed on for that or for Facebook.

[+ quoththeraven]

And now for something completely different, or at least a view dissenting from the majority of those posted here so far.

 

First, let's be clear here: these images were stolen from personal iCloud storage meant to protect the items in question from the eyes of anyone not authorized by the subject to see them, and the subjects did nothing to compromise that. If anyone goofed, it was Apple.

 

As men, you have the luxury of indifference and of believing that anyone who stores something in the cloud is asking for trouble. You are not subject to crude jokes, name-calling, and rape and death threats because nude photos of you have surfaced on the internet. Or rape, death threats, and doxxing/outing (that's revealing personal information like one's name, address, phone number, and e-mail address) for simple crime of being female on the internet. I kid you not. The worst that's likely to happen is someone making fun of your penis if it's small or an odd shape or of the shape of your body if you're not ripped, the latter being something that can probably be discerned from perfectly innocuous clothed photos as well.

 

That's assuming anyone's interested in hacking your nude photos to begin with; it's a lot less fun to victimize men that way than women because men are taught to be proud of being sexual (or nude) rather than ashamed and women are aware that racy photos of them will be used to ridicule them no matter how good they look. In fact if they look good the comments will mostly be about how attractive their boobs, genitals, and other features are and how fuckable that makes them.

 

I call bullshit. By this reasoning, we all should expect to have our private financial information hacked over the internet and those who do were just asking for it. How many of you do e-banking or purchase items over the internet? How did you feel when you heard about Target, various banks, and many, many other companies reporting unauthorized access to customers' personal data? And if you think there's no such thing as privacy because the contents of nude photos, e-mails, and phone calls are routinely subject to outside scrutiny, do you think e-commerce is exempt, and if you don't, why are you still using it? Or, to use another analogy, you shouldn't be surprised or make a fuss when you're pickpocketed or mugged because carrying around a wad of cash (perhaps to pay your favorite escort!) is just asking for it.

 

More pointed yet, why are you bothering with a pseudonym here and special e-mail accounts and burner phones to make appointments with escorts if privacy is not to be expected? Why does the site's ToS include a prohibition on outing people and personal identification? I don't see any difference between the desire for discretion about one's hiring of escorts or an escort's true identity and the desire for privacy when it comes to nude photos.

 

Sorry, privacy is still a thing we should be able to expect (NSA aside, and even there, no one has alleged interception and maintenance of more than metadata; what that means with respect to photos, I don't know) and criminal thuggish behavior is still criminal thuggish behavior. Moreover, putting things in the cloud has benefits that other means of storage doesn't; backing up to another computer at one's home is useless in the event of a casualty loss or hard drive failure; physical photos can be stolen as well (and I don't hear anyone arguing that isn't a privacy as well as a criminal violation); and offsite physical storage can be difficult and expensive to arrange, inefficient for most individuals, is subject to the same casualty risks as onsite storage, and has some of the same risks of outside interference as cloud storage.

 

Here's an analysis that addresses the NSA analogy:

 

The Nude Celebrity Photo Theft Should Scare You More Than the NSA Does (New Republic)

 

For a more sarcastic and deservedly angry feminist take from which I took some of my arguments, see this:

 

Don't be like Jennifer Lawrence, girls - it's bad for your health (The Mirror)

 

Just to be clear: I haven't yet been subjected to doxxing, crude jokes, name-calling, or rape or death threats because of amything I've posted on the internet, but countless other women have, and I count myself lucky to have avoided it so far.

 

Also, if you didn't already know, 4chan -- the site where the leaked photos were posted -- is notorious as a site where everyone is anonymous (not just pseudonymous) and is populated by straight geeky/nerdy guys who get their jollies by, among other things, objectifying women and describing anything they don't like as gay. It is far worse than, say, Reddit, corners of which have their own unsavory reputation. Is that really the group you want to be defending, or at least saying "no harm, no foul" about?

[+ Funguy]

But the whole point is …. we SHOULD have the expectation of privacy. BUT we already know we do not. I agree, QTR, with what you said but reality rears its nasty head and, put simply, if you do it, it will come back to haunt you - no ifs, ands, or buts. So don't do it if you care!

 

I'm not saying it's right. I'm saying that's what is happening, period.

[+ quoththeraven]

But the whole point is …. we SHOULD have the expectation of privacy. BUT we already know we do not. I agree, QTR, with what you said but reality rears its nasty head and, put simply, if you do it, it will come back to haunt you - no ifs, ands, or buts. So don't do it if you care!

 

I'm not saying it's right. I'm saying that's what is happening, period.

 

I don't think the state of things is as dire as you think. If these privacy violations are so common and to be expected, why are they still criminal? That in itself suggests that society thinks this stuff is private irrespective of how easy it is to hack or whether the government or employees of the company with whom it's stored have access to it.

 

I think it's hard for others to understand how frustrating it is when the only group for whom this has consequences is women. Women are constantly told they're at fault when they're raped, sexually harassed, subject to revenge porn, or have nude or otherwise racy photos leaked rather than the men involved being called out and prosecuted. (Admittedly, revenge porn was only a civil offense until recently.) So excuse me if I'm not very sympathetic to another argument that tells women they have to be more careful and live more circumscribed lives than they already do. In what way does the supposed lack of privacy on the internet inhibit you or men in general?

 

Despite my exasperated tone, the fact that we disagree doesn't make you a bad person, it just means I think you (and the others who agree with you) are wrong on this one.

[+ Funguy]

But the whole point is …. we SHOULD have the expectation of privacy. BUT we already know we do not. I agree, QTR, with what you said but reality rears its nasty head and, put simply, if you do it, it will come back to haunt you - no ifs, ands, or buts. So don't do it if you care!

 

I'm not saying it's right. I'm saying that's what is happening, period.

 

We don't disagree other than to say that you should not count on privacy.

[Steven_Draker]

I think we should adjust our expectations of "privacy" to meet the reality.

 

 

The Illusion Of Privacy: You're Not In Control

 

Are you an avid user of Snapchat, that kind of person who likes bits that go poof? If you or your kids are under 25, chances are you do. The wildly popular photo-sharing app—which promises that pictures self-destruct after 10 seconds—is a clear sign that many people long for privacy. Snapchat claims to have finally delivered to us a medium that does not forever save and store our data. We want that! Of course we do.

 

Unfortunately, Snapchat doesn’t quite transport us to the land of data privacy. It sounds too good to be true, and it is. In much the same way that Facebook deludes people into the belief that they can actually be private, it gives us a false sense of security. Twitter makes no bones about privacy; it is, and claims to be, an open public network where you are public by default. With the likes Snapchat and Facebook—and most of social media, in fact—many mistakenly believe in the illusion of being private.

 

The specific problem with Snapchat, of course, is that while the photo message on Snapchat disappears from the phone of the recipient after a few seconds, it does not prevent the nimble-fingered receiver from taking a screenshot. If that happens you get an alert, but what good does that really do? It certainly doesn’t prevent the screenshot from being shared with others, as happened at this New Jersey high school. There’s another hack to work around that alert. And last but far from least, do we even really understand what happens to those snaps as they hop the internet from one phone to another, screenshot or no?

 

There are just as many problems, if not more, with Facebook’s privacy settings. The biggest is that the company constantly changes them with the perverse effect of eroding its users’ privacy. It forces millions of people to waste precious time to understand the changes and how to plug gaping new privacy holes. (Check out this brilliant visualization of how Facebook keeps moving the privacy goalposts.)

 

The bottom line is that your friends tend to reveal your supposedly private data, both intentionally and accidentally—for example by sharing your “private” pictures via their own, wide-open account. Of course, it’s worth noting that privacy in itself contradicts Facebook’s raison d’etre of virality.

 

So why do services even attempt to create this notion of privacy for users? Because there is a growing demand for services that don’t violate your privacy. If data, or their analytic essence, is the up and coming asset for players such as Facebook, dangling a false or misleading sense of privacy in front of users gives us all an incentive to share even more.

 

It’s a con game. But don’t take our word for it—ask Alessandro Acquisti, a behavioral economist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. He created quite a stir at this year’s SXSW-conference where he presented his latest research, entitled “Misplaced Confidences: Privacy and the Control Paradox.” It documents the fact that making people feel more in control of their data can lead to their sharing more sensitive information with strangers.

 

Acquisti asked two groups the same questions, some mundane, some very personal: Have you ever been fired? Have you ever used drugs? Have you lied about your age, had cosmetic surgery, or had sex in a public venue? He found that the group that thought their answers were treated anonymously or privately were willing to tell much more about themselves than the group that knew their answers could become public.

 

Companies that make money by first luring you in and then selling out your behavior know how to work it. Acquisti and CMU colleague Fred Stutzmann showed that Facebook users have been engaged in a losing battle with the social network to keep their private data under wraps. In their study “Silent Listeners,” the researchers analyzed more than 5,000 Facebook users over the course of six years, from 2005 through 2011. They discovered that people tried to increasingly restrict what they shared, but Facebook generated so many new settings and loopholes, particularly in the past couple of years, that its users ended up revealing even more than before. In that sense, the expression “privacy settings” sounds like Orwellian Newspeak.

 

 

 

And speaking of silent listeners—how many are there, really? One Stanford study tried its hand at “Quantifying the Invisible Audience in Social Networks.” People generally have no idea how many parties are siphoning off their supposedly private feed. On average, the audience of a Facebook user is four times the size people assume. In other words: post something to 100 so-called “friends,” and it’s skimmed off by 300 strangers, including app developers and advertisers.

 

In a recent portrait in the New York Times, Acquisti summarized his findings this way: “What worries me is that transparency and control are empty words that are used to push responsibility to the user for problems that are being created by others.”

 

Don’t fall for the privacy honeypots set by current social media services. Chances are they will game you with promises of control and ephemeral content. Once your digital tidbits are out there, you can almost never take them back.

 

Take a look instead at the new and emerging class of services that let you encrypt and wipe multimedia communications between phones, and even posts on social networks: Silent Circle by PGP encryption guru Phil Zimmermann; or new plug-ins like Privly and scrambls. Apps like these make sure that ultimately, you’re the one in control of your data, not someone else. Because do you really want to trust what they tell you is private? Or do you want to determine your own privacy on your own terms?

 

source: http://www.dailydot.com/opinion/digital-seldefense-illusion-of-privacy/

[Frankly Rich]

Well-said, QTR. You sure have a way with words.

[Epigonos]

Let’s bring this topic a little closer to home. While I was teaching in a conservative suburban school district of Los Angeles I could easily have been fired and my retirement pension compromised if it became common knowledge that I hired male “escorts” THUS I didn’t. Now that I am retired if it becomes common knowledge that I hire males “escorts” my family would be shocked and appalled and I would be highly embarrassed BUT I am willing to take that chance.

 

We must ALL, celebrities and common folk alike, understand that if we do things in private that we don’t what made public we had DAMN well better not do them. It really is that simple.

[Frankly Rich]

Gosh, Epigonos, language, please! And in capital letters too!