Privacy in the Wake of the Celeb Nudie Scandal

Last Sunday, a poster from the Internet forum 4chan released nude photos of celebrities including Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton, Lea Michele, and Ariana Grande. However, this wasn’t just your typical celebrity nude photo leak.

An Internet hacker figured out a flaw in Apple’s iCloud system, because an imaginary digital storage space hanging somewhere in our stratosphere wasn’t going to fly smoothly forever, and reportedly accessed more than 100 celebrities’ nude photos.

Although many of the celebs have claimed, (and then unclaimed — ya we’re looking at you, Nickelodeon star Victoria Justice) the nude photos of them are fake, both Lawrence and Upton’s representatives released statements confirming the photos are, in fact, them.

Now that most of our information has gone digital, our mothers are constantly warning us that what we post on the Internet, the photos we take, and the text messages we send can never go away. But just the same, it's not uncommon for people to assume they have all-access passes to all of the personal, nitty-gritty details of celebrities’ lives. It is frequently argued that celebrities know what they're getting into when they enter the spotlight, but does that make it okay for their private, intimate photos to circulate the Internet? Absolutely not.

“This is a flagrant violation of privacy. The authorities have been contacted and will prosecute anyone who posts stolen photos of Jennifer Lawrence,” the star’s representative said in a statement to The Hollywood Reporter. I’m pleasantly surprised J-Law is taking this hacking so seriously, with her usual forced quirkiness and “funny girl” façade, I would have expected her to draw a mustache on her cooter and then circulate them again herself, or maybe even make a meme.

This scandal will only continue to grow — now, the leaked nude photos of Lawrence and Upton will go on display in a Los Angeles artist’s upcoming exhibit at the Cory Allen Contemporary Art’s The Showroom in Florida, reports E! Online. It’s been said before that the human body is art, and with that analogy, Kate Upton’s piece in this exhibit will be nothing shy of Picasso.

Lawrence and the other celebrities who were hacked are not to blame for this scandal. Just because a person is famous, doesn’t mean that their privacy should be compromised. What people choose to do — celebrities included — in their private time is completely up to them and should not be exposed for the entire world to see. Unless, of course, they pull a Rihanna and leave the blinds to their hotel totally open because they just don’t give a motherfuck.

It’s easy to say that the best way to solve this problem is for women to not take nude photos of themselves. But, further oppressing women with regards to sexuality is more of a problem than a “solution”.

According to a survey conducted by Cosmopolitan, 89 percent of millennial women have taken nude photos of themselves at some point, and 82 percent of those women said they would do it again.

The recent celebrity nude photo scandal is a prime example of revenge porn, and this crime should not go unnoticed. These celebrities were unfairly targeted and had their privacy invaded. Dear hackers, do you want all of Internet land seeing your nudies? Hmm, didn’t think so — not that we wanted to see you naked anyways, #SorryNotSorry.