2014 has seen a serious number of celebrity photo leaks – it’s definitely not the first time something like this has happened, but the way the events unfolded this time was much more serious, and it created a snowballing effect where more and more people were hopping on the bandwagon. As a result, many celebrities saw their accounts compromised, and their private photos leaking to the Internet. And while it’s not a secret that these incidents were popular, given how prominent they’ve been in the media, the way they actually rank against other queries in the most popular Internet search engines might be a bit surprising to some.
A bit of research into the public data provided by companies like Google shows that the photo leaks of various celebrities rank in the top 10 most popular searches for various periods of time, including for 2014 as a whole. People’s interest in leaked celebrity photos apparently ranked on a similar level as ISIS, Malaysia Airlines and the Ferguson protests.
It’s not that surprising that a large portion of Internet users have been actively interested in these leaks, but some commentators have been stating that this is not just part of the problem, it’s actually the very root of it. It’s a vicious cycle – celebrity photo leaks cause a spike of interest, which leads to more people searching for these materials, which in turn generates even more interest and gives malicious hackers an even bigger incentive to work hard.
According to some, this would not even be a problem if people as a whole were able to ignore the leaks and paid attention to other, more serious problems – but it’s been known for a long time that celebrity news don’t work that way, and there will always be a very large crowd for news of this type.
The leaks seem to be dying down in the last few months, although there have been several new incidents, but nothing of the scale of the most serious leaks that 2014 saw. Some have been commenting that the main victim of the whole scandal have been cloud storage companies, as their services have been the target of much criticism after several particular leaks. On the other hand, both people from the affected companies, as well as industry experts, have been of the opinion that the responsibility lies with the end user to protect their privacy with adequate measures, such as a strong enough password and 2-factor authentication for services that allow for it. Following the leaks, some cloud storage companies have stepped up their security measures, in some cases to the displeasure of their users who’ve been forced to go through additional steps to log into their accounts.