Please Stop Saying ’Celebs Shouldn’t Have Taken Nude Photos In The First Place’
►http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/09/01/sext-abstinence-education-doesnt-work
This is the “sext abstinence education” approach to scandalous selfies: ‘If you don’t take them, they can’t get out into the world and embarrass you.’ This is true, but much like telling people not to have sex until marriage to protect themselves against STDs, pregnancy, and heartbreak, it’s not practical advice for most people. The digital age has changed courtship in many ways, and this is one of them. Texting nude photos is increasingly part of the sexual repertoire; phones have become sex toys. Studies show that the number of people sexting is on the rise. Nine percent of people were willing to admit to Pew Research this year that they’ve sent nude photos to someone else, while 20 percent fessed up to receiving nude shots (a curious mismatch). That’s up from 6% and 15%, respectively, in 2012. I too used to preach not taking scandalous selfies, but given their inevitability, it’s far wiser to shift to a focus on practicing ‘safe sext.’
If it is Apple’s infrastructure to blame, many of these people may not have realized that their photos were being sent to the cloud. It is a-not-entirely-transparent process as to how photos get there and are stored there, as ridiculed in the oddly prescient Sex Tape, a new movie in which the protagonists make what you’d think they’d make based on the title, and accidentally distribute it to friends and relatives; it stars Cameron Diaz and Jason Segel (who appear to be among the few celebrities not included in this massive leak). Apple like Google, Dropbox, and many other companies does encourage consumers to store more and more of their data in the cloud so it’s easily accessible and not easily lost, but they don’t have an ALL-CAPS warning to ‘beware of the fact that once enabled, this will become a very wide net for your data, including any intimate snaps.’
