The true scandal of the fappenning-the one really useful thing about it-is that you couldn’t wish for a clearer demonstration of how all of us now entrust the most private information about ourselves to the guardianship of public companies that have consistently proven themselves unworthy of that trust.What is it with Gawker? Are they just incompetent, or are they actually trying to get sued into bankruptcy? And regardless of whether the problem, this time, was caused by flaws in Apple software, or in the products of some other company, fixing those flaws will not slay the hydra. There is no scandal in the fact that Jennifer Lawrence or any of the other dozens of celebrities affected by this data breach may have had intimate, nude pictures of themselves on their cell phones. It is the inevitable result of exploitive processes in which we are all implicated. It is not an aberration, or a breakdown in the system. This means that the leak of celebrities’ naked pictures is not a Black Swan event. And the default choices that most of these companies make, about what to do with our data, are not made in our own best interests-they are made in the best interests of the companies. But in fact, Facebook is not like oxygen. I have a friend who likes to say that “Facebook is like oxygen,” and it is true that mobile social media is so fully identified with the exchange of intimacy and the affirmation of ego that few of us, no matter how famous or how humble, can imagine getting along without it. Even if that’s true, parsing the tradeoff distracts from the one useful revelation of the fappening: the extent of our dependence on the cloud, and how vulnerable to being hurt that dependence can make us when precious things are put in its care. Why do we do this? Maybe, as some say, we are so dazzled by the cloud’s convenience that we are willing to give up security and freedom. And every time we agree to their Terms of Service, we waive our rights to file any kind of lawsuit, no matter what they do with our information. Yet we choose, again and again, to trust them completely and unconditionally, despite the fact that data breaches occur all the time. We don't really know much about what they do with our data, where they keep it, or how they protect it. Many of those statements later prove to be untrue. The companies sometimes make statements about the security of all this material. In exchange for these tools, users allow the tech giants to handle and inspect all the stuff we show, and all the stuff we look at, and to keep copies of it, perhaps forever, on computer servers that we do not control, and never will. These tools let users live in streams of information about other people’s lives while enabling the same users to send out streams of information about their own lives. Whatever you call it, its tools have the whole world hooked. Call it connectivity call it seduction, or surveillance call it voyeurism or exhibitionism. The basic technical fact that allowed for “the fappening” is inseparable from a basic economic fact about the business model of social-media and cloud-data-storage companies.Īpple and its tech-giant peers-Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Microsoft, and the rest (and also every upstart social-media and data-storage app)-are part of a complex industry whose fundamental product can be described in many ways. And definitely not naked pictures, no matter who you are.īut if you don’t want to concede to the scolds, even on a technical basis, then there is another available outlook. Not source code for the world’s mightiest companies. Not chemical formulas for drugs in development. Not a defense contractor’s design schematics for fighter jets. Not a law firm’s merger and acquisitions plans. (Precisely where on the cloud these photos were stored, no one can say, although Apple’s iCloud and the Find My iPhone app have been mentioned as possible attack vectors.) Nothing, but nothing, that is stored on the cloud can be considered “safe” from hacking. That means the photos were taken, not from the stars’ actual cell phones, but from the “cloud” of remote Internet servers out there where everyone’s data actually or also resides. Many, perhaps all, of the leaked photos were reportedly stored on the cloud and allegedly stolen from the cloud. In this case, it obscured the two logically primary aspects of how this hack occurred. Existentially riveting though this blame game may have been, it shed no light on the basic facts of what occurred, facts that make this data breach worthy of the wide attention it has drawn.
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