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I really do not blame any straight guy or gay lady for peeking. Jennifer Lawrence AND Kate Upton? It isn't even fair.
The position that you should just lay back and let your photos be spread around because hackerz and internetz is complete bullshit. Apple is selling a service that they claim is secure, same as your credit card company and everything else you use. Life is increasingly lived online, and companies who allow others into your private stuff are at fault, period. Telling people "don't have fun taking sexy pics" is really no different than telling them "don't take pics of your pets" or even "don't shop online" -- it's none of your fuckin' business what they're doing there.
I didn't look and I didn't want to . Which is how I felt. Really, who wants to be reminded at 62, how georgeous a young woman's body is. Like you Dan, if they had been pictures of naked men.. Would have been tempted.
Considering the exhibitionist nature of many of the hacked victims, I'm not sure the outrage is all that sincere. In some cases, the only difference between the illicit and official images is body paint or airbrushing.
Yep, a crime has been committed. But when you nonchalantly gave away your right to privacy to Apple/Google/MS/Amazon without a peep...
Maybe uploading everything to the cloud as a default wasn't a great idea, no? I'll just leave my front door unlocked but closed everyday I go to work. It'll be fine.
By the way, it's interesting how many here are saying it's wrong to look but implying that if the celebs were men, they might do it. Not sure what that signifies (or is it just a joke?) But seems like a common theme.
I feel more "got caught staring in the gym locker room" guilty than "peeping tom" guilty. They aren't out there for my enjoyment one way or the other, but they're out there nonetheless.
I just another sleazy site, the Daily Fail/Mail, my guilty pleasure...
What I admire is your ability to approximate to the total theme of what Sloggers are saying. So many posts just get so drawn out with no cohesion. I'd like to see more people try to concentrate on the consensus and tidy it up into brief summations. That's probably too practical for the crazy and wild freedom that we love as Slog. Eh.
However, I'm not sure that "watch what you put on the internet" is even applicable for some of these people. Kate Upton makes her living posing for nearly-naked pictures for people to masturbate to (unless you really think Sports Illustrated is trying to sell swimsuits).
If I *had* found them, I would have looked. And probably enjoyed it, because they're pretty and I'm a straight guy. And no, I wouldn't have felt the least bit bad about it. The pics have already been stolen, and the "harm" has already been done. If I found stolen property, I would return it. But there's no way to "return" these pictures. It's like trying to unhear something that's been said. Too late.
I will add one caveat, however. I would only look at the pictures on some random no-budget blog where I know the owner of it did not pay for the pictures. I agree it would be wrong to directly subsidize theft.
I say that because a few years ago, when Dustin Lance Black's nekid photos got all over the internet, I looked. That was roughly a similar ethical dilemma: naked photos taken in private, dumped on the internet (by an ex-BF, not a hacker, but still). I did feel guilty, but my curiosity and titilation overrode my guilt. I felt bad for looking, but it was also kind of hot. I felt bad for him, but I looked anyway. I suppose that makes me kind of a jerk, but there you are.
If it happened tomorrow to a male celeb that I thought was hot... I'd probably look. And feel guilty.
I DO feel sympathy for them the same way I'd feel sympathy for someone whose iPhone got stolen after they'd left it on the passenger seat of their unlocked car on a shady street corner. It sucks, but I really don't understand how people put so much trust in "The Cloud". Even if it weren't for the fact that millions of people trust this ambiguous cloud they know literally nothing about to store all the important info in their lives, the NSA is still a thing. Nothing digital stays private. NOTHING. I don't even know a whole lot about about computers or any of that, but I do know that every guy you hire to fix your computer is looking for images to steal, and Obama has seen your nudes already.
The people at the apple store looked at me like I was stupid when I told them I didn't trust The Cloud, who's stupid now? It's like instead of a safety deposit box in a bank you just give your shit to some guy in a really nice van and don't even ask him where he's taking it.
Also, to hell with all the feminist bullshit about "psychic rape" and someone trying to destroy or debase these women. People like titties, that is the beginning and the end of it.
Not going to look.
You either respect their privacy or you do not.
As far as the cell phone not being a means of broadcast communication, I say BS. You can hear people having sex through walls, voices carry, voices also broadcast with or without the phone. And these pics aren't a dialogue, they are a visual broadcast. In the picture, it is not at all clear who the intended recipient is (and "lover" doesn't count).
These celebrities have peoples whose job it is not have this happen. As @18 said, we're safe because we're nobody. It's not even clear what the negative side effects will be on there careers.
Nonsense. Sure, the "theft" of the photos was wrong, but the only reason for that is because the women's privacy was potentially violated by the likes of you (and millions of others.) I mean, the theft itself resulted in neither direct monetary, nor physical loss to the victim, so it could even be argued there was no damage done until people started viewing the images.
And I don't mean to single you out, though you pretty neatly sum up the viewpoints so many others have expressed. I'm also a straight guy, but just not impressed by celebrity, which may be the main reason I've not viewed them (I don't really know who Jennifer Lawrence is. I'm sure she's gorgeous, though if I want to see photos of gorgeous naked women on the Internet, I'm pretty sure I could find shots of someone who likely consented to them.)
Even if these were people I cared about and I thought they were hot, I probably wouldn't bother. But I'm not particularly interested in celebrities as sex objects and never have been. And the privacy issue is real.
"Well, you shouldn't put nude photos on the internet" is the new "Well, what were you wearing?"
There are plenty of consensual nudes out there. I'd rather look at those.
Also, Yvonne Strahovsky has an amazing body.
Goddamnit, this fan needs you to connect those dots (and nips)!!!
* Don't have your password reset secret questions be answerable with a couple minutes on tmz or wikipedia
* Use 2-factor authentication. If your service doesn't offer it, switch to another service.
With our currently crazy legal system and the way it deals with these issues I wouldn't be surprised if they were.
http://maximumble.thebookofbiff.com/2014…
Besides, just seeing someone naked isn't what turns me on anyway. I was cured of that by the time I was 14. I'm far more interested in what goes on between the ears of someone who's enthusiastic about doing the pervy things I'm into.
You either respect their privacy or you do not.
those precautions are useless if it's the cloud itself that gets hacked and not these people's personal accounts. The sheer volume of photos these people claim to have is evidence of a monumental breach in security on the other end.
And @40
Comparing taking compromising photos of yourself and sending them to an ambiguous server you know absolutely nothing about is not at all similar to taking a dump in the privacy of your own home. And NSA can probably see you doing that too.
I'd like to know if when this Robin Abcarian person hears about someone dying in a car accident, they think "what, you didn't know by now that there are drunk drivers out there?"
And how many of us can't get sexy pictures from their partners because of fears that they'll be hacked and exposed? B^(
* Use a strong password
* Don't have your password reset secret questions be answerable with a couple minutes on tmz or wikipedia
* Use 2-factor authentication. If your service doesn't offer it, switch to another service."
None of this would have protected those celebrities from the exploit that took their backups.
Many of these images have been traded around by a select group of IT and hacker shit bags for months (if not years). What was "leaked" was only the tip of the ice berg.
-----------------
That's my feeling. Violating someone's privacy just to satisfy any mild curiosity I might have doesn't seem worth the violation it does to my own view of myself. They don't have anything I've never seen before, anyway. If I want to look at naked people, I'd rather do it in person, thanks.
So: the tree falls in the forest (the photo files are hacked and stolen), but did it make a sound (is it wrong) if no one hears it? (until/unless someone views the photos?)
Answer: Yes. It's wrong. But people viewing the photos is simply inevitable once they're online and the media advertises it. The wrongness doesn't increase exponentially forever - it peaks. And it all falls on the head of the person who stole the photos. My viewing the photos can't add to their feelings of violation unless my personal viwing somehow came to their attention somehow. Which it won't.
Nobody is blaming the victim by telling them to take more precautions. As long as they are not judging them as moral failures.
There is nothing immoral about taking nude photos of oneself. In fact apparently in the age of the smart phone it is de rigueur.
Assuming you have any privacy in the digital realm and trusting the authorities that manage that digital environment with your privacy is naive as hell. Even the most secure technology has profit at it's heart, not your privacy.
Yes. It's wrong of shit-bags to steal your digital files. But there are always shit bags who steal stuff. Therefor it's also naive to simply assume there is any sort of security by default. Because there isn't. You have to take precautions. And even those are not close to 100%. Not even close to 50%, really.
Much the time with these leaks there was nothing hacked at all.
How many times have jilted lovers leaked compromising digital files? Or maybe people do it for PR. Or when they're high. It's way easy to distribute digital files in fit of pique.
Fuck I assumed, when this was first misdescribed as a "leak" that JLaw "leaked" them herself.
So. You wanna get dirty? Take polaroids for fuck sake. Otherwise you had better just assume, like it or not, some shit-bag IT guy somewhere is whacking to your photo.
First, you simultaneously create a moral imperative to appear as chaste and virginal as the fictional archetype of the conservative, religious white school girl whilst marketing and selling everything - EVERYTHING - with nudity and simulated sex acts.
Then, you actually make a moral differentiation between Speedos or string bikinis and full nudity. Or, you gasp with disdain when beach attire is worn by your neighbors in their own yard.
You let your kids watch hours of extreme violence and adult sexuality, but create a public outcry when a gay couple walks together holding hands in public - god forbid they actually kiss.
"Think of the children," cries the thrice divorced mother of four and her live-in, redneck boyfriend(s) as they unload the beer, liquor, cigarettes and unusually large quantity of Sudafed from their shopping carts at the Walmart.
Again, America's immaturity, hypocrisy and schizophrenic morality about nudity and sexuality is just plain WEIRD.
You are acting on the assumption that not getting caught is what determines the morality of the act. Just because she will never look you personally in the eye doesn't make looking at these pictures less wrong. It just means you got away with it.
@70 (&@71) +1
That was my point, nowhere near as well expressed - the distinction between the full nude and the string bikini or body paint is really almost nothing.
I looked. I guess I'm huge piece of shit. So did my wife. Do did nearly everybody at our office. We were curious. So what? They were tits. Big deal. Clutch your pearls! In fact it's treads like this are driving traffic and robust curiosity to look at these images.
There is a huge gradation of moral culpability between the obsessive shit-bags that actually stole these images, compiled them for years, traded them for years, in some cases sold them— and then the literally tens of millions of people who simply clicked a link that was widely publicized on internet media rags like Gawker, looked at them, and went on with their lives.
As long as your not part of the group of insiders collecting this shit or aren't paying for them then being one more click looking at some free electrons for thirty seconds means diddly shit. We're not driving the purulent economy in unethically amassing them.
@74: Whoa, easy there! You are absolutely not in the same league as the people who stole and/or sold these pictures and neither is you wife. I do not think you are a huge piece of shit, but let me ask you, how would you feel if private naked pictures of your wife were stolen and bandied about? Her tits are just tits too. Would you be so blasé if you came into work one day and the whole office was clicking on her pictures? What about the guys in the office down the hall? Down the street? People you don't know, in the store as the two of you are buying dinner nudging each other and saying "Hey! Isn't that the gal whose tits we were looking at on break today?"
That would be a shitty situation for you and your wife, and it's a shitty situation for these women too.
That's what I'm saying.
And if people I did know were looking at stolen pictures of my wife and I didn't know about it... then... what is the scenario again?
Oh. If people I knew were looking at stolen pictures of my wife's tits and I found out? Ok. Yes. It would upset me. But that's an entirely different kettle of ethical fish.
Since they KNOW me and my wife — our mutual ethical boundaries are more distinct. And. If I knew who stole those photos? I would beat the living shit out of them.
My wife is not a public figure. People would have to go way out of their way to find these mythical photos of her tits. It would have to be a fairly severe intrusion - like a break-in. Anyway. You'd have to pose this conundrum to my wife. Her feelings matter more than mine.
JLaw doesn't know me. She doesn't know who has or who hasn't seen her tits (at this point in her career hasn't already she shown them on screen?).
One more person merely seeing them incidentally there is no provable direct harm. I'm not going to go out of my way look at them. But I clicked a link. It's not nice. It's not very ethical. But it's not that big of a deal. The harm came from them being stolen and distributed. It'd be great if the world was full of incurious perfect people. But it's not.
I mean. Fuck. Do you drive the speed limit all the time? Jesus. You're gonna kill somebody speeding, you know?
How would I know if they WERE hers if I didn't look at them? Am I just suppose to leave things I find? Should I just automatically burn them unexamined?
It would be one thing to examine these things our of curiosity. It would be another to seek to exploit the person with them - steal bank accounts or black mail based on personal details.
But looking at them? Of course many people are going to look. It's what people do.
From here on out I'm going to go ahead and assume everyone who keeps proudly proclaiming how they didn't even glance at those photos are fucking liars, or sanctimonious douche bags.
And that would suck.
Her privacy matters. So does J-Law's.
Just because you wouldn't know the name of some one fapping to stolen pictures of your wife doesn't make it any less an invasion of her privacy or any less hurtful if she were to be in that situation.
But to be clear, I don't think you're some kind of monster or anything. I really don't, and I'm not trying to make anyone here feel bad.
I'm just saying these are real people who have been humiliated and we should maybe put ourselves in their shoes and think about how we would feel if it happened to us or some one we loved.
If we can't control this, we need to return to paper printing photos.
Appalling theft of privacy.
Show some class, people.
Fucks up the whole Slog.
Now where are the nude pics of Garfunkel & Oates? That's something I'd pay to see.
But I also didn't read the newly-released J.R.R. Tolkien Beowulf because he had never wanted it published. I would probably like Tolkien's Beowulf, and it would be a thrill to read a translation by a real scholar who had an interest in the time period and a love of old or invented languages--I care a lot more about that than I care about Jennifer Lawrence's tits. But Tolkien didn't want us to look--he locked his never-finished, never-published manuscript in a drawer--so I consider this published version, brought out by his son, off limits, ethically.
Is this the same thing? I don't know. But I think people should have the right to decide to either give or deny permission for others to have access to parts of themselves that are private unless they or someone else deliberately shares them. Tits, translations, private diaries, sex taps, whatever. Unless the original owner grants access, I don't want to partake.
They might surprise you!
Also to all the "computer security" experts out there, every form of digital security outside of a perfectly utilized one time pad has a weakness. Save your rush to "help out" for the assholes who steal from and degrade others.
Put yourself in their shoes.
If there where embarrassing private pictures of you ( and to cut you off at the pass, not sexual pictures, but say pictures of you on the toilet having explosive diarrhea ) that had been stolen, and passed around the internet for all,( strangers, employers, friends and family ) to see that would do you harm.
Wouldn't you rather that people didn't look?
These women are people whose privacy is just as important as yours.