It’s happened again. Another hack; this time aimed at photos that no one intended to see the light of day. The commentary overnight from many is that they shouldn’t be seen, shouldn’t be shared or gratuitously re-tweeted — and yet they always are.
The hackers are proudly claiming that they got hold of photos from Apple’s iCloud Photostream service, which automatically syncs photos between iPhones and iPads while storing them in an online “cloud”. This is yet to be confirmed by Apple and has been disputed by others online. However the photos were sourced, this hack marks the latest in a long line of online platforms to have fallen victim to this type of attack in recent months.
At Schillings we are hearing that this attack could be associated with a broader hack into photo streams — not just targeting those in the public eye. If true, this suggests that a larger and more systematic breach is now afoot. In short, you don’t have to be famous to be targeted and it’s time all of us stopped being complacent.
This recent hack again emphasises the need for both individuals and companies to take more notice of the information they are knowingly and unknowingly making available online and in the “cloud”. In short, if it should not be there, take it down.
For those already affected, aside from changing their passwords, there are a range of legal tools including privacy, copyright, data protection and harassment that can help put the genie back in the lamp. In the past, we have managed to contain things even when they have started to spread on social media.
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Privacy is now a recognised tort in law that can protect individuals from unwarranted publication of, among other things, personal, family and relationship matters. The difficulty is that once private information becomes widely available in the public domain it’s no longer “private” and can’t be protected.
That is why in the event of a hack, with private information and photos subsequently being shared online, the first 24 hours are critical. Being able to assess what constitutes a breach of privacy, and often copyright, can enable those affected to quickly mount a robust defence to prevent publication altogether or to have existing online content removed.
As the law changes and innovations in technology make gains, those of us working in the legal sector will need to remain creative and open-minded when it comes to using age-old legal tools to solve the new-age problems of our clients.
What is clear from the events of the past few days is that control is key, and despite the legal tools available, more is needed to cope with today’s entrenched cloud services and social media platforms.
The processing and security of data and the practical embodiment of “our privacy” is the new frontier. It’s now up to individuals and companies to take the practical steps to exert their control and prevent themselves from becoming a target.
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The authors are senior partner and associate at Schillings
Duncan Lamont, partner in the reputation management team at Charles Russell LLP, explains why the old laws are up to taming the internet
The availability of nude celebrity photographs online, taken from the iCloud by hackers and then disseminated via Twitter, Reddit and others may seem totally contemporary, with the law struggling to keep up to date with the technology, but the 101 naked celebrities (which turned out to be untrue as there were a lot less and many of them were fake photographs) is likely to be the point that the “old” laws of terms and conditions and the punishment of thieves strike back and tame the unregulated internet. Put bluntly, the FBI is riding west into town.
In the eyes of celebrities and their advisers, for too long the big companies who contribute so enormously to the success of the internet have been unprepared to take responsibility for the bad behaviour of those who misuse their services, leaving it for the legal teams of celebrities to try to chase down those pedalling sex tapes, stolen photographs and fabricated images.
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Members of the public, and even celebrities, have struggled to have recourse to justice when private sexual images have been leaked online. For American superstars it is worth litigating to recover the substantial sums due under copyright law (treating the sex tape almost like any other pirated Hollywood movie). But for individuals here whose private moments of passion with a boyfriend become public when he becomes an “ex” can become bogged down in the complex rules of evidence and responsibility.
However the intrusion into the private lives of these celebs has been so vast, and so pernicious, that there has finally (excluding terrorism and paedophilia) become a public demand that whatever the freedom of expression worries might be “something must be done”. Add willpower and the existing laws work: Theft and Computer Misuse Acts (and Data Protection, Copyright and others) provide plenty of scope for the jailing of the hackers, and even the handing out of severe punishments and fines to the disseminators. The big internet organisations have terms and conditions that preclude exactly what has happened and they can identify the individual, or at least the computer, responsible.
Apple is hardly going to sit still and take the huge reputational damage. It is going to retaliate against the criminals — and administrators at Twitter, Reddit and the rest are already actively deleting disseminators from their systems and there is no reason to suppose that they will object to forthcoming police requests for identification of the hackers/worst disseminators.
A lot of people have been waiting a long time for public backing to clamp down on the internet and its wild freedoms. There is something of the zeitgeist in the internet’s near absolute freedom being curtailed not as a result of wiki leaks, paedophiles or terrorists but a relatively small group of people’s obsession with relatively tame, if rude, Hollywood selfies.