This is not to say there are no nude photographs of me. It's just that in order to achieve an acceptable approximation of not-purely-prurient art, I take them all on 19th century wooden view cameras, projecting the images onto plates of treated glass. So far, zero percent of these are under threat of being released onto the internet without my knowledge. Although I will say that I sometimes worry whether they aren't purely prurient, which why I will on occasion develop paper copies and show them, unsolicited, to strangers on public buses. Art without an audience is masturbation. Also: masturbation with an audience is highly illegal. Another thing I learned on public buses.
After hundreds of nude pictures of dozens of celebrities were blasted out, shotgun-ambush style, to the public this week, the reaction has been... enlightening, I think. I've seen the predictable slut shaming to the claims that this is a sex crime to (more widely) a resigned collective shrug recognizing the wobbliness of privacy as an idea in the go-go online wireless-connected internets 2010s world.
The first one is clearly dumb. "How dare you photograph yourself" isn't a sustainable position to take, morally or otherwise. Plus the next step usually involves the phrase "had it coming," which always has the creepy lynch-mobby feeling of disorganized societal revenge against... something. It's the same impulse that drove conversation toward talking about Michael Brown shoplifting in relation to how he was later shot to death by police in Ferguson, Mo. One has nothing to do with the other, but shoving the victim down to the level of the heinousness of the crime, even if only slightly, seems to work as a type of psychic balm for those predisposed to revenge as an idea. Because what is revenge anyway but the lazy person's stand-in for justice. Faster, cleaner, less likely to distract from the excitement of the announcement of the latest cast of Dancing with the Stars. It's the siren lure of balance promised by the lie of tautology: don't take naked pictures of yourself with your phone and you won't have to worry about the security of your naked pictures! The exclamation mark at the end stands in for the implied actual punctuation statement: whore!
I'm not sure I'd lean all the way in the other direction as far as "sex crime" either though, not because this type of violation isn't sufficiently odious or sadistic, it's just that I think it obscures the point that while the ultimate fault here definitely does land on the perpetrator, the primary fault is actually corporate crime.
This is Apple's fault. I'm not the first or only person to think this obviously, but if there is a fixable problem to be identified and confronted, it's not (and never will be) getting horny and alone people to stop sexting. People have been trying for thousands of years, we're never going to successfully legislate away boners.*
Nobody reads the terms of use. And I'd bet dollars to donut holes that in my iPhone end user agreement, I said everything was pre-emptively my fault, from iCloud security failures to bee colony collapse disorder. But as much as I love my iPhone (and I do) it's always been a needy little fucker. It always wants to know just one more thing about me. If I don't monitor and actively find and shut off all of the default features, everything I do and every location I do it in would be collectible by Apple as a corporation in some way. Naturally I assume their first impulse with all this data would be to monetize it with some harmless(?) hyper-targeted advertising. This is why I think the cloud as an idea is so seductive as it seems to solve two problems: the users' unslake-able thirst for storage and the corporate white-hot lust for customer data to later mine or sell. There's no real incentive on Apple's part to protect or hem in the data we're willingly (if maybe not completely knowingly) sending out to live on servers scattered across the world. The more seamless the process is, the more we leak out. The more we leak, the more droplets collect in the cloud until a little rain falls.
Unlike actual clouds though, in this case I think it's possible at least for us to ask for the rainmaking to be disabled as a feature. Worst case scenario should be that it would involve a call to customer support.
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*Man ones or lady ones.
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