My take on the recent celebrity photo hacking scandal.

No pictures on this one and if you need a bit of background on the story try here. The short version is that a bunch of celebrities got their iphone cloud accounts hacked and a bunch of revealing pictures were posted online  I usually don't have pointless celebrity news but in this case I can tie it into the subject of this blog. So here are my thoughts:

1. There is some serious selective outrage going on here. A couple of months ago Edward Snowden revealed that many NSA agents do the exact thing that happened to the celebrities. And that happened to regular people that still have a greater expectation of privacy then celebrities in the public eye. Did anyone really care then? Outside of a few civil libertarians, no not really. Of course what the NSA did is unethical and wrong but since they were smart enough to not post the pictures on Reddit, they got away with it. My guess is that they saw all the same pictures and more.

2. The outrage would not exist if the victims were predominantly male.  Of the top of my head, compare the outrage in this case over the cases of Brett Favre and Anthony Wiener. An even more close situation, which did not involve any photos, is the Donald Sterling case. Sure, what he said was, at the very least, offensive, but it was a private conversation posted on the internet without his consent. He was the victim but since nobody liked what he had to say in the privacy of his own home he got no sympathy. And I have to point out there were more then a few pictures of men in those photos. Aren't they the victims too? The people that are trying to make this out to be some feminist rallying cry are, at the very least, misguided.

3. At this point it is perfectly clear that if you take pictures of yourself on a phone with an internet connection, it is safe to assume that they will be leaked eventually. Obviously, this is more true for celebrities then regular people, but even regular people can be victims of this. And a lot of times it doesn't require hacking. All it takes is an angry ex or an unguarded computer and your info will be posted. My advice would be before you take a picture of yourself think "what would happen if this gets released on the internet?" If the answer is that you would feel bad or you would have some kind of consequences then you probably shouldn't do it. At the very least the NSA can look at your photos with zero effort.