We Need a "Private Photo" Mode For Phones
There
are still too many unknowns about the hack that launched a thousand
(well, a dozen or so) celeb nudes over the weekend; how it happened, what's being done to keep it from happening again. But one thing has become more clear than ever: the need for a "private photo" mode on your smartphone.
How to Keep Photos of Your Naked Body Off the Internet
If you've been conscious at any point during the past 48 hours,
you've probably heard about the slew of raunchy celeb selfies making
their way around the internet. It didn't have to be that way; despite
all appearances, you can keep your naked body off the internet. Here's how.
2 5
We Need a "Private Photo" Mode For Phones
There
are still too many unknowns about the hack that launched a thousand
(well, a dozen or so) celeb nudes over the weekend; how it happened, what's being done to keep it from happening again. But one thing has become more clear than ever: the need for a "private photo" mode on your smartphone.
That idea, advanced today by the very smart Chris Soghoian of the ACLU—and
no doubt previously by others who went unnoticed, lacking a critical
mass of naked famous people—is by no means a cure-all for nude photos
circulating. But in this case, it sure would have helped:
Apple, Google and the other big tech companies should acknowledge that millions of their customers regularly use their products to engage in sensitive, intimate activities. These companies can and should offer a "private photo" option for sensitive photos that prevents them from being uploaded to the cloud.
Emphasis added, because that is an emphatically wonderful idea. And not a difficult one to implement.
It's
not hard to imagine how it would work; open your stock iOS or Android
camera app. Toggle through to your setting. Tap once to activate Private
Photo. Voila! Your illicit pics stay on your phone where they
belong. No iCloud. No Dropbox. You'd be able to adjust your settings in
quickly enough that you wouldn't upset the lighting, much less the mood.
And the only way anyone could get at your fleshy photos would be if
they grabbed your phone (and got past the passcode, should you use one)
or if you sent them as a Snapchat, because that's your god-given right
as a human person with a body and a very expensive phone equipped with a
dual-LED flash.
Yes, you can control sharing already.
You probably do, if you're savvy enough to know that it's an option.
And there are plenty of apps that don't auto-upload pics. But iOS
devices upload photos to iCloud by default, from the minute you sign in
with your Apple ID. And it's a safe enough bet that plenty of iPhone
owners don't even realize they have an iCloud account, much less that
they're beaming their giblets to it every time they take an undressed
selfie in the mirror. A setting in your camera app that says, very
explicitly, that this is for your most explicit moments? That's
something anyone can understand, even if they don't know what exactly it
does.
In
fact, what's most brilliant about Private Photo is that we're already
conditioned to use it. Any time you pursue the slightest bit of deviance
in your browser, you head immediately to Incognito Mode, or Private
Browsing, or whatever cone of silence Internet Explorer offers. What
does that do, on a technical level? Who cares!, the horny masses cry out, it lets me watch porn without getting caught.
Just swap in "create" for "watch" and maybe "an intimate personal
portrait" for "porn," and you've got Private Photo mode. Something that
keeps your photos on your phone for as long as you want them there.
No,
it's not a complete solution. People will still choose to put their
sexytime photos in the cloud for whatever reason, or will forget to go
Private. Photos you send to other people directly from your phone are
just as vulnerable as the ones you keep in the cloud; sometimes even more so. But we clearly need a better solution than the one we've got. Two-factor verification is wonderful,
but any security measure is only as good as your ability to convince
people to use it. And as a first line of defense, I'll take something as
simple as Private Photo over jumping through authentication hoops any
day. Or, as the case might be, slightly drunken night.
end quote from:
We Need a "Private Photo" Mode For Phones
How to Keep Photos of Your Naked Body Off the Internet
If you've been conscious at any point during the past 48 hours,
you've probably heard about the slew of raunchy celeb selfies making
their way around the internet. It didn't have to be that way; despite
all appearances, you can keep your naked body off the internet. Here's how.
1. Don't take photos of your naked body.
While not really practical advice in this day and age, it's worth noting that abstinence is
the only 100% effective way to avoid photos of your naked body on the
internet. Still, we can't live in fear, and we have a right to take as
many naked pictures of our naked selves as we want. So let's see what
other options are out there.
2. If you must take photos of your naked body, don't put them on the internet.
Encrypt them on your hard drive. Make prints in your own private dark room. Stick to charcoal and passion. There are countless ways for you and your loved ones to bask in your naked glow without
uploading photos to the internet. All are still riskier than just not
taking photos in the first place (you'll never know until it's too late
if a jilted ex-lover is particularly vengeful and/or frequents 4chan),
but still far safer than what comes next.
If
you really must share intimate photos of yourself—and why wouldn't you,
you're resplendent—here are the best precautionary steps you can take.
3. If you must put them on the internet using a cloud service:
A) Enable two-step verification.
We've said it time and time again,
but it's a fact that can't be stressed enough—set-up two-step
verification on anything and everything that offers it. Especially the
cloud services you likely upload all your most precious files to.
It's
really the best possible way of protecting yourself against brute force
attacks. With two-step, anyone attempting to log into your account from
an unknown device will have to enter a code (normally sent to your
phone) before gaining access. And fortunately for you, nearly every big
internet service out there now offers the highly necessary feature.
After all, it's a safe assumption that if any of the recently hacked
celebs had two-step set up, that would be one less name on the list.
B) Encrypt your files before uploading.
This
way, even if someone manages to get their hands on your precious,
bare-skinned data, they (in most cases) won't be able to do a damn thing
about it. Encrypting a select set of files (in this case, jpegs that
showcase your danger zone) is wildly easy, meaning there's no reason not
to do it.
Services like Boxcryptor
work directly with major cloud services, so all you have to do is drag
your soon-to-be-secret files into a special folder, which will then
encrypt them before sending them off to your cloud client of choice. The
only way to decrypt the files is with your very own secure key, meaning
that anyone swiping files from your Dropbox or iCloud account would be
fresh out of luck.
4. If you must put them on the internet using social media:
A) Well, first of all, don't.
This is undoubtedly the easiest way to ensure the exposure of your naughty bits to the entire world (see: Carlos Danger).
But if you were cursed at birth, have taken a vow of Snapchat, or just
really like making poor life choices, there are some ways to help
yourself.
B) Namely—surprise surprise—two-step verification.
Sorry to repeat ourselves, but seriously. It's a (usually) mild hassle that can end up saving you a world of hurt. Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr—they all have two-factor, which means there's no reason for you not to hop on board the safety train.
C) Remember that ephemeral social media isn't quite as fleeting as it sounds.
Snapchats are never really gone, and of course, there's always the possibility that someone could take a screenshot of your snap. Not to mention the slew of potentially creepy apps that
let you open Snapchats without ever telling the sender. Just say no to
Snapchat sexting and its ilk. It's not nearly as safe as it wants you to
think.
5. If you have an iPhone, just deleting the photo from your phone isn't enough.
It
may seem convenient to have your photos automatically sent to the cloud
above any time you snap a pic, but that same convenience can come back
to bite you. As Jérôme Segura, a senior security researcher at Malwarebytes, explained to us over email:
Some celebrities thought they had deleted sensitive photos from their Camera Roll and that therefore they should be gone. This shows once again how technology can come back to haunt us. Who hasn't lost pictures or music because of an automating syncing of their device with a computer or the cloud?Similarly, the non-obtrusive back up system kept pictures in people's Photo Stream, a separate collection that is synced across multiple devices. For many, deleting the pictures from there as well and forcing another sync on a clean backup may not have been obvious.
6. If it's already out there, you've got options.
The
worst has happened, some corner of the internet is plastered with your
unattired form, and you want it gone. Unfortunately, at this point,
you're probably never going to be able to wipe the image from the
internet entirely. But you can minimize the damages.
If you wind up on an actual porn site, they'll generally be good about taking down photos as requested. And if you end up somewhere less friendly (i.e. revenge porn websites) the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is at your service. There are even places that will do the leg work for you, like End Revenge Porn, though you can always just head to DMCA.com, which allows you to file a takedown request yourself for far cheaper.
And
if all that still doesn't work, the police will be ready to step in if
needed. All of which, while occasionally necessary, is a huge hassle. So
if you decide to snap some nude selfies to share with whomever your
heart desires, go right ahead—just make sure to protect your saucy pics
ahead of time. Because that is one hard mess to clean up.
Illustration by Tara Jacoby
end quote from:
No comments:
Post a Comment