What you need to know: The JLaw nude leak

Jennifer Lawrence may be extremely embarrassed and she’s certainly not as innocent as she looks, but there are more serious lessons to take from last night’s nude leak that, at the very least, affect everyone with an iPhone.

1. Your iCloud is not safe.

Although iCloud’s secure tokens entry procedure is generally considered to be very robust it is dependent on the security of the associated e-mail account which isn’t such a sure bet. Anyone with access to your e-mail account, many of which are relatively easy for professional hackers to gain entry to, can feasibly reset passwords to your accounts and access your data. On iCloud this includes contacts, messages, photos, notes and much more. You can increase the security of your accounts by setting robust security questions and paying close attention to any strange behaviour, such as unprompted forgotten password emails, on your e-mail account. Ultimately though, if you want to protect you data it’s best to turn off any automatic cloud services you use and use only upload information you absolutely have to onto cloud services such as DropBox.

2. There is no delete button.

Given that all devices are now almost constantly connected to the internet (either by 3G, 4G, wireless or cable) and the worldwide popularity of cloud services which are both insecure and poorly understood, it is reasonable to assume that it is very difficult to delete digital content. Even after you have deleted them from your computer or phone, files sit in ‘Trash’ folders, often for months, and may already have been backed up onto a cloud server.

3. Sharing could be expensive

It has been widely reported that a spokesperson for Jennifer Lawrence has made it clear that those who share the leaked photos will be prosecuted. Speaking yesterday they said: ‘This is a flagrant violation of privacy. The authorities have been contacted and will prosecute anyone who posts the stolen photos of Jennifer Lawrence.’ Whether this threat will be, or could be, carried out or not is still up in the air, but after increased investment by law enforcement in social media policing and increased efficacy in catching perpetrators this incident may be used by ‘cyber-police’ to make a statement about criminal online behaviour.

4. Hackers are not anti-establishment moral crusaders

There is a popular assumption that hackers spend their time revealing war crimes and holding the establishment to account. According to The Economist, “criminal hackers are responsible for by far the largest number of attacks in cyberspace”, and they are mostly after money. It hasn’t been widely publicised that the hacker responsible for this incident intended to sell the photos online using bitcoin. Hackers are, mostly, common criminals who, although very intelligent, should be made out to be heroes any more than the drug addict that robbed your grandparent’s house.

5. Invasion of privacy is OK, if you’re a public figure.

It’s very easy to be off-hand about invasion of privacy when it comes to celebrities. The standard rebuttal to the right to privacy argument is that celebrities signed up to a life in the public eye when they became successful in their relative fields and that they profit from their public image. The hole in this argument is that Jennifer Lawrence, unlike Kim Kardashian, are first and foremost professionals and in reality endorsement deals and work that relies upon their public popularity makes up a tiny proportion of their pay check. They are paid handsomely for what they do because they are very good at it and there is a demand for their work. It may not be quite this black and white but…if, by that logic, their body is public property then it is perfectly acceptable for any successful lawyer, banker, doctor, woman or man to be exposed the same way. That means that it applies to you, or is likely to in the future. Still think it’s OK?

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