Over the last few hours (or day) a big mess known as “The Fappening” has turned up, as a hacker made public the fact of his possession of multiple private photographs and videos obtained (illegally of course) from the online accounts of several actresses and models. Most famous of all is Jennifer Lawrence, the 24 year old star from films such as “X-Men”, and “Hunger Games”.
This is not the first nor the last time that such news will erupt. The more connected our world becomes, the more vulnerable we all become to hacking, phishing and other internet-related dangers.
The cry of the offended actresses and models is justified – they do have a right to a private life and to choose what they wish to keep private and what to share with their adoring public. The thing is, we are all affected and exposed to these dangers.
As celebrities (or mini-celebrities as the case may be), the need to be more aware of such dangers should be even more acute and important. Never synchronize your photos and videos to any cloud service, and avoid keeping anything important there all together.
It’s much harder (unless you’re with the NSA) to break into someone’s private cell phone than to break into our online accounts – apple’s cloud service (for iphones), dropbox and box.net and any and all other cloud services that give us “free” storage – but at a price that may be paid later.
Another thing: as a rule of thumb: don’t take photos of personal nature using a connected device. Use a digital camera but make sure the wifi/nfc/bluetooth services are all turned off. And keep your personal stuff – personal.
Once the cat comes out of the bag, whether you’re famous or not, no amount of legal threats and crying would reverse the process, and stuff that goes on the internet stays there.
So, Jennifer, Next time make sure your private pics stay that way…
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