You may find as days pass by — Facebook and the button of happiness relevant reading here…
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@sil I know @jonobacon is not saying
I just feel that we can do more to help educate others on potential risks and steps they can take to mitigate them.
The big event will happen and many people will get burned but if we help reduce the number of victims or the severity of the damage . It can only be a good thing.
Agreed. Nobody has yet worked out how. I’d be interested to hear any ideas you have which are new approaches, certainly!
An irritation for me.
It is irritating in that, would it be getting the FBI’s attention if it did not involve celebrities?
Yes, it is worth it. At least that is my view. I find it compelling that while my views might not be controversial enough to get me into trouble right now … nothing says that it will always be that way in the future (or for my children … or their children … ).
For me, it is worth it.
I agree, but I think that right now for a lot of people privacy is an intellectual issue and when the big event happens it will become a real issue.
I agree this is an intellectual issue only for most people.
I may be more sensitive than most people, particularly in the western world but, it depends on where you live. If you live in the US or UK you may not be too worried about stepping on peoples toes because we have freedom of speech. Edward Snowden might want to disagree with me here.
I am a member of Amnesty International, Campaign Against the Arms Trade and a few other organisations I am also active in this respect.
My ex wife is Thai and because I speak Thai fluently I have been able to report things via Amnesty International that have gone on since 2008 based on eye witness reports. Many if not all of the eye witnesses involved could not report what they have seen personally due to fears for their own and their loved ones safety.
But as a Brit I have been able to go to Thailand “as a typical tourist” and meet people. Sometimes that’s the only time I do; other times I show them how to set-up secure communications and we are able to continue conversations after I have returned to the UK.
The information I have gained has, I hope, helped focus international attention and help people on the ground.
I’m sure similar stories are true in other parts of the world, Syria for example.
On a more frivolous but related example several beautiful female celebrities including Jennifer Lawrence have apparently had their iCloud accounts hacked and it might be possible to see some of these girls nude.
By telling these stories we make it clear that not everything is OK in internet land and encourage a demand from users for increased security.
Yes, one problem regarding privacy is ignorance and apathy. I asked a guy how he felt about the ignorance and apathy regarding privacy issues and he said: “I don’t know, and I don’t care.” 
Seriously, that is the issue, until, as been mentioned, a big event happens that shakes them out of it.
In response to @sil 's earlier comment that nobody has yet worked out how to educate others about the risks and how to mitigate them.
The BBC (British Broadcasting Corperation) has tonight, is as I type, shown a program on this subject Horizon:Inside the Dark Web
I urge those who have not seen it, and have access to BBC iPlayer to watch it.
I response to @oldgeek you are correct there is a problem with ignorance and apathy here: There are several examples already of it all going wrong at yet many people don’t care.
I discovered on Sunday thanks to twitter that Jennifer Lawrence looks quite good without any clothes on. I can’t say this was surprise - I thought she was quite attractive fully dressed, at least in the Hunger Games films - I have not seen her in anything else.
She is, in my opinion, naive to believe that iCloud or any Cloud service (you don’t personally own) is safe. I will only use the cloud for open source projects.
Is Jennifer Lawrence justifiably pissed off that some of us have seen her nude. Yes - of course she is. As an actress she has agreed to give up some privacy in return for celebrity but what she wants to keep between herself and her partner is up to her.
Ok. I don’t want to have a go here, but I’m going to, a bit. This, that you’ve said here, is not helpful criticism. What’s important is that we build a world where Jennifer Lawrence isn’t violated in this way, not that we tell her afterwards that she was doing it wrong all along. Storing your photos in the cloud has some large advantages, and it was likely done automatically and she barely knew it was happening. So, how do we mitigate the attack on her in the future while preserving the reasons she chose it? Telling people “use a Blackphone! Don’t deal with any company who uploads to the cloud to make your life easier! Encrypt your stuff with PGP!” does not work. It might work for me (and I don’t even do it) but actual real people would rather, a priori, run the risk than become computer geeks to minimise it. That a posteriori that was the wrong tradeoff is not useful feedback. What should Lawrence have done? “Never buy an Apple product” is not helpful, unless you can demonstrate how a Blackphone would have solved all her other problems.
Victim blaming? Next you’ll be telling mugging victims they were naive for going outside with their wallets on them, or any car crash victim they were naive for getting in a car? How about we nip that in the bud right here and move on.
Also maybe read This is why you shouldn’t click on the naked photos of Jennifer Lawrence and you’ll see why I find your discussion of viewing them and then rating their contents pretty creepy and akward.
Naive? To an extent, yes. If someone is mugged and there is nothing out of the ordinary with the victim, he just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, that is one thing. But to be mugged because the person went to a place that is known to be bad and is flashing cash, that is quite another. That, in no way, excuses the violence or the crime. It is just a matter of prudence.
It is sad to assume that anything one puts on the cloud is at risk. Taking prudent measures with one’s data should be a given. It would be great to know that our data ‘out there’ is secure. That is the way it should be. It is unfortunate that it isn’t. For now, one should assume that anything that is out in the cloud is up for grabs.
I still wonder how much attention would be given to the matter, especially by the FBI, if it didn’t involve celebrities.
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Good article.
Edit: Brought to mind the principles of respect. I’m sure many looking for those pictures are just curious, but one must ask, what if it was something that involved me, even in an unrelated matter? How would I feel? Empathy, a good thing.
Oh and possibly this
InfoSec Taylor Swift @SwiftOnSecurity 3m
Well, turns out the government is going to need to expand the sex offender registry by millions, some of those celeb photos were CP. =|
@dan I’m not blaming anyone here, much less the girls involved. I just think the cloud is inherently insecure and you would be a fool to leave anything on it you are not prepared to have seen.
For me at least the parallels you draw are unfair
Suppose I had a Bugatti Veyron and I left it in a busy car park with the keys in the ignition: should I be surprised if it gets stolen?
Jennifer Lawrence, Victoria Justice and the other girls involved deserve the right to privacy and full protection in law. For the record I have only seen one image and the the link to it did not say “nude celebrity here” or words to that effect so I was not expecting, to see what I saw.
This comes back to a point I was making in an earlier post people need to be educated how insecure the web can be.
I fully support twitter in closing the accounts of anybody who is posting images, or links to images of these girls and hope that the hacker who obtained these images is found and prosecuted with the full extent of the law.
[quote=“sil, post:30, topic:4088”]
What should Lawrence have done? “Never buy an Apple product” is not helpful,[/quote]
Our privacy is not in the interests of Apple, Facebook, Google or anyone else.
I have a friend who discovered his daughter was pregnant thanks to his supermarket. She was sent money-off vouchers for baby clothes.
I’m not sure how they worked it out but I’m guessing she bought a pregnancy test kit one week then a Mother and Baby or similar magazine the next for example.
Our privacy will only become a priority for these companies when we demand it. Until then the potential for them to collect data and sell it on is too strong.
You are totally correct in saying Jennifer Lawrence has been violated here. I just hope that her story helps to convince the rest of us the risks are real and not just theoretical.
Nonsense.
If you don’t think services companies are interested in the health, safety, and security of their customers, I think you are misguided. Companies want happy, repeat customers, and it is clear that privacy is a key part of this.
What those companies care less about are the needs of the hardcore privacy brigade. I don’t deny that they don’t cater to that demographic, but that is a far far way off from not caring about privacy.
This is what worries me about this debate…the assumption is that these companies have a flagrant disregard for the privacy of their customers, using examples such as the baby vouchers one you used.
I am willing to bet that the voucher thing was because your friend had signed up for a rewards card and that the inappropriate mailing was due to this. In other words…they opted in. Again, this is a far cry from a company not caring about privacy.
The risk to privacy is not companies not caring…companies have a fiduciary duty to deliver good products and services and this includes respecting the privacy of your customers.
The issue here is with hackers. The major privacy violation was lax security as opposed to lax privacy guards.
Hang on, let’s not demonize normal human curiosity. I saw the nude pictures. Why? Because it is Jennifer Lawrence and that is interesting and different. Do I condone the act of violating her privacy…absolutely not…but am I going to apologize for being curious to see something I don’t normally see? Absolutely not.
This is why people buy Us Weekly, People magazine, and Hello. People will be curious and that is never going to change. What does need to change are the security provisions in cloud services.
The main revenue stream for these companies is selling targeted advertising. There used to be a saying in advertising that one third of the money you spend on it goes to produces sales the other two thirds are just wasted. Problem was nobody knew which third was working.
This has changed - Google started by using your search terms to offer not what you want but also provide ads for things that were not what you are looking for but were the sort of thing that someone who is searching for what you are looking for may also be interested in. So far I don’t have a problem with that but they have gone further than that and now have a huge database of search terms cross referenced to user name if known or IP Address if not and geographical location.
Google mine this information to spot trends, so if a lot of people in a particular area are suddenly searching for recipes with ribs they can, and do, pass that information on for a fee and your local supermarket buys in more BBQ supplies. Again picking up on a mass shift is not an issue but in order to mine this data they keeping way too much data which can be traced to individual people or households.
This data can easily be abused. I’m not saying that someone at Apple is unconcerned that these accounts may have been hacked. They are this is damaging their reputation which leads to less customers and ultimately income.
The companies involved care about how they are perceived to be treating there customers data because happy customers come back any you can earn more money. This extra money may come from direct selling of goods and services or from advertising revenues.
I don’t mean to pick on Google specifically here Facebook, twitter and several other companies are doing the same thing.
To answer your question regarding the pregnant girl: yes she does have a loyalty card; and you could argue it’s a nice gesture to offer money off a product she is actually likely to want; It’s not the most tactful way to announce to daddy that daughter is pregnant. I also fully accept that the supermarket in question had no way of knowing she had not told daddy yet.
Excellent response to this argument from someone on twitter, which is: if someone is the victim of credit card fraud, is your response that they should stop using credit cards?