Celebrity Nude Leaks / Victim Blaming

I didn’t have enough material for a rant, so I picked a few related topics, and am combining them. Unless you live under a rock, you’ve probably heard of The Fappening and/or The Snappening, where a ton of celebrity iCloud accounts and a ton of SnapChat files were hacked. Most healthy people would decry this as the invasion of privacy that it is. Oddly, there are a surprisingly high number of people who blame the victims.

For instance, a common thing I’ve heard is “well she shouldn’t have taken the pictures in the first place.” That’s like saying that if you have your car stolen, it’s your own fault for owning a car. In this case, however, the hackers hacked a supposedly secure system. So to return to my car theft analogy, it’s like saying that if you had your car (that was locked, had a car alarm engaged, and was in your locked garage) stolen, it’s still your fault.

Now when I heard about the celebrity leaks, and read the list of victims, my first thought was, “who the fuck are these people?” I mean, I recognized a few of the names, but most were completely unknown to me. I could meet them on the street and talk to them for ten minutes and still have no clue that they were famous.

Side Rant: Shouldn’t there be a standard for being considered a “celebrity”? Like, you have to have had a starring role in at least five successful projects first? Why is it so easy to be famous? I have my own website. It’s even named after me. Does that make me a celebrity? No. Because I don’t actually do anything. Having a guest role on some show that no one watches, shouldn’t make you a celebrity, either.

Anyway, these hackers were able to brute force the passwords for the iCloud accounts. They had to actually know which email addresses to use, so those had to be hacked too. Then, they would tell iCloud to backup the files to their own computer. From a tech standpoint, it was quite creative, and to Apple’s reputation, they patched the security vulnerability pretty quickly.

The hackers went to a lot of work, and spent months, if not years, doing this. They traded them in a small circle of people for a while before it became public knowledge. And what did the celebrities do to deserve this? Nothing. If it were the case of someone like Paris Hilton, who I’m like 95% sure wanted the sex tape leaked so she could suck on fame’s tit, I would argue that whoever “leaked” it probably was helping her (assuming she didn’t leak the tape herself). As I said though, this wasn’t that case. These people took sexy pics for themselves, their boyfriends, their husbands, or whatever. They had no plan for anyone else to see them. They are victims here, so stop blaming them. Sure, if they didn’t take them, they couldn’t possibly be leaked. And if you never went outside, you couldn’t ever be struck by lightening or be stabbed on the streets. Just because they have the possibility to do something, doesn’t mean anything that happens is their fault. If I stole someone’s wallet, it’s not their fault for having a wallet. It’s the most idiotic logic I’ve ever heard.

I mean, these people are bothered constantly by the paparazzi, and every minute detail of their lives has a magnifying glass focused on it. Now, they can’t even have the privacy in their own homes. This also goes for “revenge porn”, where an ex posts pictures that his girlfriend sent him online, to get back at her for whatever reason. If you’re trusted with someone’s nudes, respect them enough to honor that.

As for the Snappening, they basically hacked a 3rd party site, so SnapChat wasn’t the vulnerability. I don’t have much to say about it, mainly because out of the 13 gigs of files leaked, 90% of them were of nothing exciting. Like food, and clothed selfies. Why leak that shit? Just to say you could? What a waste of time. If they were going to leak files, they should have at least filtered through the junk before releasing it.

Look, I’m a perv. I love naked women. We each have a small part of ourselves that is a bit voyeuristic. It’s the reason we stop and look at car accidents. It’s the reason we gossip at work. We want to inject ourselves into places we don’t belong. So I get the excitement of seeing someone naked you normally wouldn’t get to see. That doesn’t mean we have the right to it, though. I want a million dollars. I don’t have the right to rob a bank. We should respect their privacy. If you don’t care about their privacy, then consider this: if women’s private nudes keep getting released on the internet, THEY WILL STOP SENDING US NUDES. You’re girlfriend or wife or whatever, will stop sending you tit pics, because she will worry about someone hacking her. So on behalf of all pervert, I’m asking you hackers and you asshole exes to stop this shit, or you’ll ruin it for all of us.