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The Correct Response To Photo Hack Victim-Blamers
In a new Vanity Fair interview, Jennifer Lawrence calls the theft of her nude photos a "sex crime". Predictably, a good portion of the 300+ comments posted on TheVerge's article contained an element of victim-blaming -- "maybe people in her position should think twice about taking nude photos? I’m sure it could help" ; "She posted them online. Unless she is a complete rube, she should have known of the security risks" ; "Victims can be blamed for putting themselves into potentially exploitable situations. Something similar might be going to a rave without a friend." ; and more variations on things that had already been said many times ever since the original photo leak on August 31st.
These comments are mostly being met with angry backlash from other commenters, which is good. But the rebuttals themselves tend to violate the rules of logic and consistency, which is bad. And when victim-blamers can spot the flaws so easily in their opponents' logic, their own minds are unlikely to be changed.
A typical example of a weak "rebuttal" is this cartoon you may have seen shared on Facebook, in which an arrogant man lectures women, "Don't want your nude selfies to leak, ladies? Simple: don't take any! Bothered by street harassment? Don't be so eager to walk down streets." Sorry, but if the second piece of advice was meant to highlight the absurdity of the first, the analogy doesn't work -- because you kinda have to walk down streets, but nobody has to take a nude selfie.
This is a recurring theme in the "rebuttal" comments that I've seen, including those on TheVerge's article -- telling the victim-blamers that they might just as well blame themselves for the risks of walking down the street, or buying something from Home Depot ( burn! ), or having a credit card at all, or owning a valuable object that could be a target of theft. Sample comments: "by that standard... you shouldn’t have had something of value to begin with, or else you were just asking for it to be stolen" ; "Just like when you walk down the street you should be fully aware of the potential to be mugged" ; "So, we will hold you to the very same 'complete rube' test when you fall victim to identity theft or unauthorized charges to your credit cards" ; etc.
All of these "rebuttals" are committing the same logical error: they're drawing an analogy to things that you either have to do (walk down the street) or pretty-much-have to do (own a credit card, own at least one valuable object). This means the victim-blamers have such an easy response -- "Those are all things you have to do; but taking a nude selfie is different, because nobody has to do that!" So the victim-blamers are unlikely to have their minds changed by such an analogy, since their own central premise is so obvious to them: the victims chose to take the nude selfies, and the leak never would have happened if they hadn't.
So, let's respond to the victim-blamers on their own terms, by acknowledging first of all: Of course, they're right. Of course taking the selfies was an optional choice, and of course the only way to stop nude selfies from leaking, is not to take them. But this is ignoring (a) the benefits of taking nude selfies; and (b) the low risk of them getting leaked. (The fact that the pictures did get leaked, does not mean that the selfie-takers misjudged the risk of it happening; rather, it was very unlikely, but the victims got unlucky and it happened to them.)
To begin with the benefits: Jennifer Lawrence explained bluntly in her Vanity Fair interview why she took the photos: "I was in a loving, healthy, great relationship for four years. It was long distance, and either your boyfriend is going to look at porn or he's going to look at you." (Considering how easily she could have gotten away with some platitudes about how "deeply hurt" she was, and how she "thanks all her fans for her support in this difficult period" -- doesn't a quote like that make you think she's decently cool?) OK, so that's the benefit. To her boyfriend at the time, a pretty big benefit.
As for the risks, whenever someone takes a risk of a bad outcome and the bad outcome does happen, it's tempting to think that they misjudged the risks. (I'll bet that a psychological experiment could demonstrate this easily -- have test subjects read stories of people who took a risk that was known to be small, but who got unlucky and fell victim to the bad outcome anyway, and see if the test subjects incorrectly judge the risk-takers to be foolish.) But out of the millions of nude photos that are probably sent between cell phone users every month, a vanishly small proportion of them get stolen in security breaches of cloud storage. (Usually the far greater risk is that the recipient will forward the image to other people until it gets out of control.) There's no reason to think that Jennifer Lawrence and other victims of the hacking scandal underestimated the risk of the photos being stolen from the cloud. If anything, most users are probably over-estimating the risk today, while the news of the breach is fresh in their minds.
In cases where the benefits of an action clearly don't outweigh the risks, that's when "victim-blaming" might be appropriate, even if we don't call it that. If someone leaves their car unlocked and leaves a valuable item in plain view in the front seat, we might feel less sorry for them if they return to their car to find it stolen. But it's a logical error to blame the victim just because they took a risk; the real reason to blame them is that there's no counterbalancing benefit to leaving the car door unlocked, or failing to move the valuable item into the trunk.
By contrast, when victim-blamers say that a woman is "bringing the risk upon herself" (of harassment, or even assault) by going out in a halter top, the logically correct response is not to say that victim-blamer is "clearly" wrong. Because, again, to the victim-blamer, their own premise is obviously true: wearing a sexy outfit in public does increase your risk of harassment, and probably even of being groped or worse. The fallacy is that the victim-blamer is ignoring the benefits of that choice. A woman never knows when she might meet a guy out in public that she's attracted to, and if they hit it off, it helps to have an outfit that says, "I'm a real woman, not a moron who thinks that if I engage in pre-marital kissing then Jesus will set me on fire with a blowtorch." Wearing a halter top has its benefits, which is why some women do it.
So that's it. The correct response to the victim-blamers is not to draw false analogies to "having a credit card" or "walking down the street". The correct response is that taking nude selfies is a perfectly rational choice when the probable benefits outweigh the probable risks. That is, in fact, the only rational defense of any action, ever. But it's not getting any play, because it doesn't fit in a tweet.
105 characters. Yes, it does fit in a tweet.
As commenters continue to blame Jennifer Lawrence and other celebrities for allowing their nude photos to be stolen
No one is blaming them for "allowing their photos to be stolen" I didn't bother reading the rest if that's how you started.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
I live in a fairly good town but still don't leave my doors unlocked, EVER. I still don't expect to get blamed should I forget one day and my car gets stolen.
Just like someone who has their digital media stolen from the cloud is not to blame and the law should back them up. However there are certain things you just do not do even if the law supports the activity. For example parking a Ferrari in a bad part of town with the doors unlocked and the keys in the ignition. The law needs to track down that car if it is stolen but the person doing this is still an idiot.
Stop telling children not to take candy from strangers, tell strangers not to give candy to children.
Don't tell children to be careful when crossing the street. Tell drivers not to run over children.
It's the same thing with these leaked images.
Sure the hacker is in the wrong and whatever, but it's still your responsibility to keep your data secure.
Saying "but there was a pedestrian crossing and I had the right of way" doesn't help you when you're lying in the hospital with broken bones.
I had a cousin who used to wear a lot of gold jewelry. He also lived in a shitty neighborhood. Everyone used to call him crazy for it, but he ignored this, because he was fucking stupid. Of course, he got mugged, and lost all his jewelry one day (he's lucky that's all he lost).
He was the victim of a crime.
He was also fucking stupid.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
On the one hand, we know why this guy took three weeks to weigh in: he wrote a f***ing essay no one will ever read.
On the other hand, it's being published three weeks after the last person cared, so length is irrelevant, I guess.
I don't think it counts as victim blaming to say, "use a stronger password next time (non-dictionary)."
I don't think it counts as victim blaming to say, "don't stick your finger in that light socket next time."
I don't think it counts as victim blaming to say, "don't put anything on the internet that you don't want to get spread around."
There's a difference between teaching someone to protect themselves, and blaming someone. If you can't tell the difference, please don't reply to my post.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
This is dumb on the level of 'blame the victim' dumb. Should everything online be a cost-benefit analysis now?
You know who should be in trouble? The person/people who stole the photos in the first place
If I have naked selfies printed out in my house[*] and someone comes in and steals them, I won't get "well you shouldn't have naked photos of yourself in the house". I get "hey, they stole items from you!". You don't blame the person that made the lock. You don't blame the person if they left the house unlocked. Breaking and entering is a crime. Full stop. There may be other issues if the criminal acquired a master key or picked the lock, or the lock was faulty to begin with, but the blame lies on the person that walked in without authorization and stole property.
What I do with my personal equipment and how I store it and how it can be accessed isn't your business nor do I have to justify myself to you about it.
[*] I do not. You are welcome.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
A little more about the man before he is completely eviscerated online...
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
It's stupid and counterproductive to blame the victims of a crime. That said, it's very useful to turn this into a fable to teach people how to prevent future occurrences. And the simplest way to explain it is to say something like, "They should have secured their data"
To dismiss that statement outright with the phrase "victim blaming" is to throw away the ability to learn from their experiences. If what you hear is "no crime occurred" you're reading into it something that was not said.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
They were all sluts, and Jeniffer is a nice girl, she is.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
What is your bank password, grandpa. You expect anything you sent on the internet to be publicly available, right?
Sexting is common in long distance relationships, whether you like it or not. These images were texted to a partner. The image app gladly backed-up the new images to apple cloud. They were not or they did intend to put it on the internet. Your argument is completely invalid
You can be a victim and still be an idiot.
"If someone leaves their car unlocked and leaves a valuable item in plain view in the front seat, we might feel less sorry for them if they return to their car to find it stolen. But it's a logical error to blame the victim just because they took a risk; the real reason to blame them is that there's no counterbalancing benefit to leaving the car door unlocked, or failing to move the valuable item into the trunk. "
The benifit of not puttin the thing in the trunk and not locking the car is it was less effort to do and will be less effort to open the car and get to the thing aftewards.
Much like the hacked accounts and the benefit of not using a more secure password.
I'm worried that "victim blaming" has been redefined. It seems it might once have been "the perpitrator is excused becuase of the victim", which is not what has been said.
I'm sure there are costs associated with banks building vaults, locking doors, hiring guards, having survellence: avoiding those costs would be a clear benefit. But if they fail at those (or if Home Depot fails to spend enough money wisely enough on securing their POS systems) we correctly fault the bank (or Home Depot) for their lack of care while still rightly villifying the person who broke in and stole the money.
These people took risks. Those risks included taking nude photos, uploading those photos to internet-attached servers, and failing to use good security. Those risks did not apy off. This does not excuse those who hacked the accounts. It is not "victim blaming" in the classic sense either. it is rightly pointing out a lack of due care.
If I have sex with a woman who lies to me and tells me she is on birth control and becomes pregnant, carrying the fetus to term, I am on the hook for birth control. She is allowed to do with the sperm what she wishes.
If I receive nude photos from a woman and I lie to her, telling her I will not upload these to the Internet and then I do, I am likely to get sued to even face jail time.
The law here is inconsistent. Nude photos sent to someone should constitute a gift and be treated accordingly. There should not be special laws. A person's potential embarrassment should not preempt personal freedoms.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
First - Bennett should have said the "probability of them being leaked," not the "risk." Risk has a specific meaning: it's the probability of something happening TIMES the damage that occurs if it does happen.
Celebrities taking nude photos is a HIGH risk. They have a moderate (not low) probability of leaking and a HIGH damage should they leak.
If you write your pin number on your ATM card are you not at least partially to blame when a thief finds the card and cleans out your account? Of course the thief is wrong, but wow you were stupid!
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
We don't call them stupid for getting their photos stolen. We call them stupid for
1) Taking them and
2) Putting them onto a medium that is accessible via internet.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
> What is your bank password, grandpa.
What kind of moron keeps a banking password in their dropbox?
That's the only thing that's comparable to this photo hack.
Banks (unlike Apple) are MUCH more diligent about your banking password. This is not something that is published in the clear ANYWHERE.
That information is not "in the cloud" really in any way that's comparable to Jennifer's nude photos.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Jennifer Lawrence explained bluntly in her Vanity Fair interview why she took the photos: "I was in a loving, healthy, great relationship for four years. It was long distance, and either your boyfriend is going to look at porn or he's going to look at you."
Somehow that doesn't sound like a loving healthy relationship. It sounds like a relationship based on sex and mutual attraction.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
But the law needs to be fixed the other way around. I.e. The woman should be held responsible for her actions with the sperm, not the guy.
Similarly, the man that receives the photos should not be allowed to do with them what he wants.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Oh please. I say this is a massive publicity stunt. How many celebs leaked "sex tapes" back in the day, expressing outrage right up until the months of careful planning and PR were revealed.
Secondly, "sex crime"? Good lord. Women today want everything to be classified as a sex crime. Give me a break.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
They were kind enough to put that "Read below to see what Bennett has to say" phrase before the fold, so at least I knew what I was getting into when I clicked the link in my RSS feed. I'm glad they're finally putting a warning label on his posts, since I'm tired of being ambushed by the "Bennett bait-and-switch", when we discover that there's an article where there's supposed to be a summary.
The appeal of Slashdot is its comments. Let Slashdot do what it does best: provide a quick summary, leave room for people to express their own thoughts, and provide a link to the article for people interested in reading more. Hosting the entirety of Bennett's post here subverts the comments by sucking all of the air out of the room and ensuring that whatever issue he's discussing will be ignored in favor of complaining about his post being here, as should be evident from every long-form Bennett post in the last few months.
If his goal is to communicate to us, then he really needs to consider his audience and rethink the methods he's employing. Maybe try speaking to us in the format we come here for?
A woman never knows when she might meet a guy out in public that she's attracted to, and if they hit it off, it helps to have an outfit that says, "I'm a real woman, not a moron who thinks that if I engage in pre-marital kissing then Jesus will set me on fire with a blowtorch."
My wife chooses to dress modestly in public, as do lots of women in my circles, both religious and non-religious. To me, none of their outfits communicate that they are "morons".
Feminism -- You're Doing it Wrong.
If you write your pin number on your ATM card are you not at least partially to blame when a thief finds the card and cleans out your account? Of course the thief is wrong, but wow you were stupid!
Yes, that's called "negligence."
It's why, in that situation, the bank would refuse to reverse the charges, and probably get away with it.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
I only came here for the "what a massive douche this guy is" comments....
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
It's not about victim blaming, but instead learning from their experience to keep it from happening to you. The discussion isn't about what kinds of pictures should I or should I not have the right to take of myself.
Coeds living in college dorms have the right to enjoy the fresh air by opening a window. But, if that same coed is on the ground floor, that probably isn't a wise thing to do. How do we know this -- because in the past, it has led to very negative consequences. Are they to blame, no. In an ideal world, nothing bad would happen if one lived on the ground floor and left the window open or saved nude pictures of yourself on an online service.
But we don't live in an ideal world. That's why we don't let children play in the playground without supervision. That's why our houses and cars have locks. It's why we use passwords and encryption on files. We are not in an ideal world and there are less than noble people who will take what they want and hurt others in the process.
As such, this isn't about blaming the victims whose pictures were hacked. It is a wake up call that the security needed to keep private things private isn't at a level to guarantee safety. As such, like the coed on the ground floor, it is better to voluntarily give up a small right to protect ones self from having somebody else harm you. For those who have already been harmed by this, maybe their story will keep somebody else from being harmed. It's not about blame -- it's about learning to protect yourself.
I've alway said. If you don't want something leaked on the internet. Don't store it on the internet. Be it nude selfies or anything else.
> and of course the only way to stop nude selfies from leaking, is not to take them.
Um, no. That's one way, but not the only way.
As to the benefit vs risk argument, I guess it depends how much it means to you to have your selfies made public. If you're a kardashian, it's a *feature*. If you're Jennifer Lawrence, perhaps it's an embarrassment, (until she does her first full frontal in a film, and then those frames will be all over the internet) but if she really feels that strongly about it (a "sex crime"? Seriously?) then she should think about (a) take your nudies, but NOT WITH A PHONE, you dope! It's not like you've NEVER HEARD of a celeb's phone getting hacked. Look we know you're smart enough to read a script. You should be able to figure out that phones are not secure. (b) The security of "the cloud" is inversely proportional to the value of the data. That your nudies (which were fairly tame, by the way. And a little grainy. Consider moving out to the patio.) would be a prime target for hackers pretty much goes without saying.
What it comes down to, is this: You don't secure the crown jewels with a $3 novelty lock. Depending on cell phone security to keep nekkid photos of Jennifer Lawrence private is exactly the electronic equivalent of a $3 novelty lock securing the pr0n equivalent of the crown jewels. You don't blame the victim for the crime, but you can point out that the victim did not use security appropriate for the value of the object.
Compared to most of us, Lawrence is loaded. She could afford to have a pr0n assistant (I can already see people lining up for that job) who's sole purpose is to distribute her nudies to whomever she's dating, with appropriate NDAs signed, in a secure fashion.
To wit: Take the photos with a real digital camera, not a phone. Put the physical media in a patched-up, antivirus-protected PC, encrypt the photo, send it via a secure, non-well-known email provider, then destroy the original. Educate the recipient on the value of security and the pain he will experience if he lets it get out.
If that's too much to do, then either don't take nude selfies, or lower your privacy expectations. Don't run around with your pants down and complain that everyone is screwing you.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
it's a long forgotten attribute called taking responsibility for your own actions. If someone wants to take nude photos of themselves then go for it. But don't go whining when the photos get leaked.
How stupid can these people be?
They take a nude photo and store it on a cellphone that can easily be compromised or stolen - mistake #1
Then then store the photo on some "cloud service", or email it, or otherwise create copies of the photo that they can no longer control - mistake #2
Choose weak passwords that can easily be guessed - mistake #3
These days it seems that everyone wants to be a victim. Why? Because it provides a built in excuse for fucking up. Cast the blame on someone else rather than own up to your own mistakes.
Actually, this is nothing new. In the days before digital cameras, the "thefts" occurred at the drug store or wherever the film was being processed. It was more difficult to disseminate the stolen pictures to millions of people, but they were stolen just the same.
As for being a victim, well, technically they are. In hind sight, was it foolish to store said photos on-line. Yes, it was, but that doesn't mean they weren't a victim. If your local bank gets robbed and you can't get accessed to your funds for a week, aren't you still a victim? Or are you proposing that people don't put money in banks?
Like a bank, these online storage services have a fiduciary responsibility to their customers. That responsibility was breached and the customers who had their photos stolen (nude or otherwise) were harmed by that failure. How are they not a victim?
False equivalence. They didn't leave their password out. Their accounts were cracked.
BH;DR
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
As I've maintained since this scandal broke, if one doesn't fully understand all of the technologies and their implications when creating the content in the first place, one simply cannot control that content.
Devices nowadays are designed to share. Let that sink in a minute. Devices nowadays are designed to share. Smartphones are cloud-connected, and every smartphone OS make at least offers some degree of automatic cloud storage, and there are lots of third-party applications that also offer automatic cloud storage. Smartphones also designed to easily interface with PCs to share content to where it can be used on a bigger display. PCs are designed to look for open shares on trusted networks to make use of the content on those shares. PCs can also share/save to the cloud.
Just about all of this software is closed-source. Even as computer professionals we don't know all that it's capble of doing, and we cannot review it for unadvertized capabilities either. We have to trust that it works as advertised and only as advertised, that there are no undocumented features that make it work otherwise, and that there are no expoitable bugs that were unintentionally introduced.
And all of this is just the end-user-device side. This doesn't even begin to address the cloud-side, the protocols, or other things.
End-users that aren't computer professionals have no chance. Even computer professionals really don't have a good shot either.
The only winning move is not to play.
Ms. Lawrence is on record saying that she supplied photos to a significant-other so he'd look at her instead of looking at other women. Good intentions perhaps, but the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. She did not understand the technology, and now she's paying the consequences of that ignorance.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Right. On FB, where I personally know most of the people I see commenting, it's pretty obvious that the victim blamers are invariably those of a conservative persuasion. As people of that ilk are often not persuadable by things like the science of evolution and AGW, it's hardly surprising they are illogical on this issue too.
Or, his settings were wrong, and inadvertently put the files that she sent him on the cloud somewhere, or his device was vulnerable and was broken into...
This shows that there were at least three points of failure. There was her point, his point, and the communications medium between them. That doesn't even factor into account possible cloud storage for her or him, or automatic sharing of files between one's own network connected devices, which now could bring us easily up to seven points of failure.
This is why those of us that are being chewed-out for blaming the victim are kind of pissed off. It's well known that this is all a big tangled mess, and in the same fashion that one wouldn't go walking through an area known for muggings during the time of day or night when muggings are most common because one can't control the behavior of the muggers, one shouldn't use insecure communications devices or mediums for things that present one with a hell of a lot to lose because one cannot control the actions of others. It's unfortunate that we live in a world where people will do this, but pragmatically, just because it's morally wrong doesn't mean that it won't happen anyway. One's own choices dictate how much of a victim one has the potential of becoming, and these circumstances show that it will be a problem, regardless of how wrong it may be.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Why were the photos anywhere besides on the user's personal, hand-held device?
That's what I mean by being designed to share. From the user's perspective, the photos were automagically copied on to a cloud-based service. The photos were not stored solely on the picture-taking device, ie the smartphone, and ended up in a place that has lots and lots of users connecting to it on a regular basis. The sheer number of connections alone helps obscure inappropriate use, and coupled with the particularly lax security policies, it was much easier for access to be gained.
It's possible that the users knew that their private content was being stored on someone else's server, and that they'd intentionally set-up their phone or computer to back-up their private content on someone else's server, so it again comes back to not knowing how the software (in this case on that someone else's server) is configured, and it having a bug or other vulnerability making it easy for people to gain access to their content.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.