2014 has been a peculiar year for celebrities, especially female ones, as a recent trend has been taking the Internet by storm, quite to the disdain to some big stars. It all started with the leak of Jennifer Lawrence’s semi-nude photos from her phone, and then quickly spiraled out of control into something that malicious hackers see as a fun challenge right now. Getting access to, and leaking, private photos of famous individuals is a trend growing at an alarming rate, and it’s not clear where exactly it’s going to end up.
The most recent example of the situation has been related to the cheerleaders of the Dallas Cowboys, who are now being systematically targeted with attempts to leak their photos. There have already been some successful hits, according to reports, including Sarah Shahi who was the first victim of the latest round of attacks. Several more cheerleaders of the team have also been connected to various nude photos, although some of those remain unconfirmed.
Rihanna and Avril Lavigne have also suffered from similar attacks earlier, although they had adequate legal support to deal with the issue and kill the problem in its roots. Others were not so lucky, as Google have been notoriously slow to respond to requests when they come from ordinary people and not major legal departments of large corporations. Although the company has acknowledged the issue and expressed their desire to improve the situation in the future, nothing has come out of that so far.
The situation has also been problematic for Apple, who have reportedly been targeted by accusations that they are partially responsible for the leaks, at least those coming from iCloud. While it can be questioned whether or not Apple could have protected their servers better, it’s still clear that it’s not a good idea to upload private photos to the Internet, even if they’re supposedly locked behind a password. This incident has quite clearly shown that having such photos online is basically asking for trouble, and an incident is bound to happen sooner or later.
The year is not over yet, and the anonymous hackers who have allegedly been behind most of the attacks have expressed a desire to move forward and continue leaking the photos of any celebrities they can find. Some experts commenting on the issue have expressed their concern with the whole situation, claiming that it could ultimately be used as an argument for tightening the grip on Internet users through laws that give governments more control. There have actually been speculations that this could all be a ploy with this exact purpose, although those have so far been random one-off comments and not any major opinion trends.