Rebecca Moore wonders why anyone would put their nude pictures on a site that could be hacked

Two weeks ago I spent a large portion of a Sunday trying to upload my entire Mac catalogue to iCloud.

Despite the security risk I perceived lurking (surely?) on the horizon, I really wanted to free up space on my laptop and save decade-old pictures and documents somewhere other than on the thing I carry around all day, every day.

Luckily, my IT skills proved inadequate for the task. Because it was revealed this week that untold personal pictures and data have been accessed via iCloud and many nude selfies of celebrities appeared online immediately.

However, even if my IT skills had been somehow adequate, my naked pictures would not have been available for all to see.

Because I’ll tell you what I don’t do: I don’t take naked pictures of myself. Not for my own pleasure. Not for anyone else’s pleasure.

Not on a device that somebody could steal, like my Smartphone, at least. Why on earth take these pictures on your phone – that anyone could steal, never mind hack – in the first place, if you’re at all genuinely concerned that somebody might one day see them?

Wasn’t the Polaroid camera basically invented especially for the naked selfie? The issue of whether or not people are dumb for syncing their devices direct to an invisible storage system in the sky so that every image –– EVERY image – is instantly available for hackers is certainly not the point.

A violation of privacy has taken place and it’s unacceptable.

But still, it does highlight a rather tragic-comic truth of our society: many, many people DO regularly take naked selfies.

If you really do think it necessary to take them, why have them immediately synced to an invisible storage centre that you damn well know is going to be hacked one day? When I was a young girl I kept a journal. When I look back in it nowadays I see the usual student angst about whether he fancies me, what I should wear to a party, who has been horrid to me at school that day.

But the really important stuff – the stuff about the most intimate things I was getting up to, makes no appearance at all.

I wasn’t stupid. I knew that my mum could casually flick through that thing. And I obviously deemed that too great a risk.

These celebrities and copious other people still have a right to be angry, of course. They can – and probably will – still sue. And so they should.

But if I were them, my overriding feeling would be one of regret that I ever trusted something as fallible as technology to keep my dignity.

And this is why I feel confident that I’m sure the celebs can’t be that genuinely devastated about them.

You simply wouldn’t take them if you would be THAT bothered about somebody – perhaps, EVERYBODY – ever seeing them.

Suffice to say, I’m still not on iCloud and now have no intention of loading my whole world on there. I’ve got embarrassing pictures of myself, of course, that I wouldn’t necessarily love somebody to see.

But if they did somehow surface, it wouldn’t be the end of my world.

If there ever had been pictures in the world that could end my career or my reputation or crush me in some other way, they simply wouldn’t exist. I would make sure of that.

  • Do you want alerts delivered straight to your phone via our WhatsApp service? Text NEWS or SPORT or NEWS AND SPORT, depending on which services you want, and your full name to 07767 417704. Save our number into your phone’s contacts as Oxford Mail WhatsApp and ensure you have WhatsApp installed.