A trove of nude celebrity photos spread like wildfire across the Internet over the weekend, shortly after someone - and who did it is unknown - posted the pictures to 4chan and Reddit, two hugely popular anonymous online message boards.
The cache of photos, which included images of stars like Jennifer Lawrence and Kate Upton, quickly became trading fodder among regulars of the websites.
They were hardly the first nude celebrity images to make their way online. But their publication is touching off a larger discussion across the Internet on the state of privacy and civil liberties on the web, and the role that big tech companies play in policing users who repeatedly push the boundaries of taste. Some say the big companies do not do enough.
Recently, Twitter came under fire for its loose stance on what is permissible on its network of 271 million monthly users when Robin Williams's daughter quit the service after being attacked via Twitter messages about her father's death.
And after the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, a terrorist organization, posted a video of the beheading of James Foley, an American journalist, to YouTube last month, some made calls for more stringent guidelines on the services. Many users urged people to take matters into their own hands, advocating not viewing the video.
'YouTube has clear policies that outline what content is acceptable to post on YouTube, and we remove videos violating these policies when flagged by our users,' a YouTube spokeswoman said in a statement.
This position does not satisfy some privacy advocates, especially in the light of the nude photos over the weekend.
The incident 'should be treated like a sex crime, a privacy invasion taken to an extreme,' said Jules Polonetsky, executive director of the Future of Privacy Forum, a Washington advocacy group. 'Sites allowing the sharing of these pictures can and should be taking proactive action to remove these pictures. And the bystanders who figure it's O.K. just to look should understand that they are harming other human beings by doing so.'
Others say Internet users themselves should do some self-policing, taking a more hard-line approach than companies have traditionally been willing to take. On Reddit, a site whose users are well known for a libertarian, laissez-faire approach to community censorship, the photos were quickly embraced, with at least one subforum dedicated to discussing and trading them.
Reddit did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but in the past, the site's policy has been to allow its users police themselves, letting self-appointed community moderators decide what is and is not appropriate to appear on the site.
When the pictures began to surface on the web, some news reports suggested that Apple's online storage service, iCloud, had been breached. But even on Tuesday, it remained unclear just what caused the leak and if the photos had been stolen, as some of the pictures were at least a year old. Security researchers could offer only theories, including one that the celebrities had been tricked into giving up their passwords, or that perhaps their passwords had been guessed with automatic scripts.
Apple on Monday afternoon said it was looking into the report.
'We take user privacy very seriously and are actively investigating this report,' Nat Kerris, an Apple spokeswoman, said in a statement.
Posted by Unknown on Wednesday, September 3, 2014 - Rating: 4.5
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