When Jennifer Lawrence, the Oscar-winning actress, learnt last weekend that up to 60 intimate photographs of her had been stolen and posted online she made no attempt to conceal her bewilderment and distress. “It’s so weird and hard how people take your privacy away from you,” tweeted the star of Silver Linings Playbook, who was catapulted to global fame by her leading role in The Hunger Games series.
The photographs, said to show Lawrence, 24, in various states of undress, had been hacked from the iCloud, where Apple automatically stores images from iPhones and iPads. They had then been posted on 4chan, a photosharing website, and sold for the equivalent of £75 in the digital currency bitcoin.
Even as her spokesman warned that anyone posting the photographs would be prosecuted, a picture of Lawrence reclining on a sofa was said to have become the most widely circulated of the set. There are even plans to print them on life-sized canvases for exhibition at a contemporary art event in Florida.
“JLaw”, as she is known, was one of more than 100 celebrity victims of the iCloud hack. They reportedly included the singers Rihanna and Avril Lavigne, the British models Cara Delevingne and Kelly Brook, and actresses ranging from Kirsten Dunst, the star of the Spider-Man series, to Jessica Brown Findlay, Lady Sybil in Downton Abbey.
Another actress, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, 29, who starred in the horror film The Thing, condemned the “creepy effort” that had gone into distributing photographs she had taken with her husband years ago in the privacy of their home and later deleted.
Advertisement
A vicious response from Twitter trolls prompted the American actress to leave the site and misogyny has been at play in some quarters, with the stars blamed for having consented to the pictures in the first place or for being careless with their digital security. But mainly there has been an outpouring of sympathy.
Women have posted naked solidarity pictures of themselves with a “LeakforJLaw” hashtag. The Harry Potter star Emma Watson, who was not among the victims, condemned a“lack of empathy” demonstrated by some online commentators. After a short break, Winstead is back on Twitter.
The violation of privacy may be shocking but the existence of the images and videos themselves is far less so: the taking and sending of naked pictures has become an ordinary part of many people’s sexual identity since the advent of smartphones.
Sometimes it seems as if everyone is at it. Anthony Weiner resigned from the US Congress after admitting he had exchanged explicit messages and photographs with six women. Intimate pictures of the footballer Ashley Cole were reported to have been sent to a model from a phone he had discarded.
“Sexting” has long been common among teenagers and twentysomethings, and last week one in 10 people questioned by YouGov admitted they had filmed or photographed themselves having sex.
Advertisement
It is no surprise that all this has made its way into the movies: Sex Tape, an extremely well-timed Cameron Diaz film about a leaked home video, has just been released in British cinemas.
What lies behind the fashion for nude selfies and videos highlighted by the iCloud “Celebgate”? And if celebrities accustomed to protecting their privacy from the scrutiny of fans can be caught out by hackers “phishing” for access by finding out usernames and passwords, how secure is the intimate information in anyone’s digital accounts?
ANY doubts that sending naked pictures has gone mainstream can be dispelled by taking a turn down a leafy lane in the home counties and meeting the middle-class denizens of a Buckinghamshire market town. This is the heart of commuterville, the BMW belt, full of gravel drives and middle-class mores. Divorce is common, so there are plenty of single, middle-aged women in town. They cannot quite believe what they are seeing on their phones.
Advertisement
“There are lots of us who are back in the dating game and recently single,” said Liz, a 49-year-old legal professional. “But it’s a bit different this time around. Very early on in a relationship — it seems to be the second or third text, before you’ve met — people will either send a smutty message or a full frontal picture.
“It’s like an animalistic peacock display that’s filtered up from the teens. I’ll show you my bits, then you show me yours, and then we’ll mate. Each of my single friends would tell you just how many photos of naked men they’ve got.”
Many of Liz’s friends use the Plenty of Fish website, which she says has become an easy place to find casual hookups. “People are having a lot of fun with it, but if you go on that website you have to know what to expect.”
Naked photos provide plenty of kicks, but as we were reminded last week, there are some significant potential pitfalls.
Karen, 47, is a friend of Liz’s who indulges in the odd sexy picture exchange. Liz said: “The problem came when she had her Apple phone in the kitchen synched to her iPad in the living room. Her 12-year-old son was busy playing on the iPad when some pictures started popping up. He got a pretty nasty surprise. You’ve got to check your settings.”
Advertisement
Some of the women caught up in Celebgate now know that their information reached the iCloud for the same reason: they had not checked their settings, which will default to backing up photos on the storage service unless told otherwise. But whether through the hacking exposed last week, a revenge attack in which an ex-lover posts compromising photos or just a moment of carelessness, many of us know of someone who has had a disastrous leak of personal material.
People have been filming and taking pictures of themselves since the camera was invented. But with the rise of social media and the cameraphone, we have got used to creating a visual narrative of our lives. Every important moment is documented. We are all the stars of our own personal movies; the naked pictures and videos are just the sex scenes.
Natasha Walter, author of Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism, believes some of our predilection for selfie smuttiness originates in online porn.
“Many young people learn about sex through pornography on the internet. Many people watch porn. So they are inserting themselves into that visual narrative. This is something that is a part of people’s sex lives.”
For many of the young people interviewed for this article, sending naked pictures or making videos is a part of ordinary life, something they or their friends have done since they entered sexual maturity.
Advertisement
“Lots of people use Tinder [the dating app] to send pictures of themselves,” said Gabriel, 20, a student at University College London. “There is less social capital at stake; you don’t know the person involved, they don’t know your friends. People find it quite liberating.”
However well you know or do not know the recipient, there is always a chance that the picture or video could end up somewhere you do not want it to. This danger adds a frisson to the process, but it can also give cause for concern.
“Yeah, sure, when I was younger I sent pictures to boys who I was seeing,” said Sophie, 20, a student at Trinity College Dublin. “I do wonder what happened to those pictures. It is a worry that they could be used against you at some point in the future.”
IF ANY good does come of one of the biggest violations of celebrities’ privacy, it might be that these sorts of misgivings become more widespread.
Apple and 4chan have both responded to events. Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, has announced that in the coming weeks the company will start sending people alerts whenever anyone tries to change their password or log in for the first time from a new device.
4chan has introduced a new policy that allows the holders of copyright to send a “takedown notice” if illicit content is posted. Legal action may be taken if the content is not removed.
Will people now become more careful about what they send and where their private data is stored? Just as teenagers and students were the drivers of the naked selfie, there are signs that they may be leading a retreat from overexposure. Celebgate could expedite this process.
Laura, a 19-year-old gap-year student from London, believes the celebrities’ fate will encourage others to be more careful. “You can’t really make people be aware of it unless something happens to them. But seeing it happen to very familiar people will definitely have an impact.”
Sophie said: “I definitely think people will be more cautious after this. I’ve been more careful about my online presence for a while now and adjusted my privacy settings.”
Such sentiments appear to be part of a broader trend. A report in June on a survey of 25,000 young people by EU Kids Online shows that sexual messaging was the only area of online risk in which activity has decreased in the past four years.
The proportion of those aged between nine and 16 who had seen hate messages went up from 13% to 20% and figures for those who had seen pro-anorexia sites rose from 8% to 14%. But the number who had received sexual messages went down from 14% to 5%.
A combination of better education and scandal is thought to be the cause: most young people know someone who has had their fingers burnt by sexting.
“I think young people are wising up all the time,” says Sonia Livingstone, professor of social psychology at the London School of Economics. “There is more and more discussion of how nothing is really private online, and more and more awareness that what you upload cannot easily be taken down.”
Will this new caution filter up to the “porn again” generation of middle-Englanders swapping naked pictures on Plenty of Fish?
“Maybe in time,” said Liz. “But it seems the first thing anyone does with new technology is use it for pornography. What did we do when we all first got the internet 20 years ago . . . searched for sex.”