Tracking the fallout from the celebrity photo leak
(source: Flickr)
After the nude selfies of several celebrities surfaced online last week, an angry public outcry has forced technology companies to respond.
Change began with the popular discussion site 4Chan, where users have long had a reputation for posting and distributing seedy content.
With little fanfare, the site announced the adoption of a copyright policy faithful to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which would allow content owners to have material removed from the site.
As Constitution Daily reported last week, the DMCA empowers any citizen—celebrity or not—to send a “take-down request” to a digital publisher, claiming that he or she owns the copyright to content shared on the publisher’s platform.
At that point, the publisher must take down the content but is allowed to re-post it after a specified time period if he or she contests the original request. The copyright owner can then send another request—which is when “lawyers get involved in the process.”
Because each of its discussion boards is limited in the amount of content it can display, 4chan has let its users do as they please, since older content disappears rather quickly. Now, however, the site will accept DMCA requests and will notify infringing users when requests are honored.
Of course, that doesn’t solve the problem of how the photos were obtained in the first place.
In an exclusive interview with the Wall Street Journal, Apple CEO Tim Cook admitted that hackers were able to access celebrity iCloud accounts by guessing answers to security questions or by “phishing” for usernames and passwords. Company servers were not directly implicated.
Going forward, said Cook, Apple will notify users immediately when a password is changed, when iCloud data is restored to a new device or when someone logs into iCloud for the first time on a device. But Cook denied any suggestion that Apple hadn’t done enough to protect user data. Instead, he turned his gaze to the users themselves.
“When I step back from this terrible scenario that happened and say what more could we have done, I think about the awareness piece,” he said. “I think we have a responsibility to ratchet that up. That’s not really an engineering thing.”
As Apple rolls out a new iPhone and “iWatch” in the coming weeks, the tech giant will also step up its efforts to educate users about the dangers of hacking and tools such as “two-factor authentication” that can improve security.
Finally, after a good deal of tumult over the weekend, Reddit banned all forums created to post and share the celebrity photos found on 4chan and elsewhere.
As community manager Lisa Liebig explained, the “subreddits” were banned because staff were facing a never-ending game of “Whac-A-Mole” in trying to keep copyrighted or illegal (i.e. pictures of minors) content off the site. Upon taking down one post, users would reupload the photos using a new host.
Plus, Liebig wrote, those new image hosts were frequently pay-per-click and malware-infested sites, causing harm to Reddit users and the larger site itself.
Nevertheless, Reddit CEO Yishan Wang made a point to assure users that their First Amendment rights were not being violated.
“We uphold the ideal of free speech on reddit as much as possible not because we are legally bound to, but because we believe that you – the user – has the right to choose between right and wrong, good and evil, and that it is your responsibility to do so,” Wang wrote. “When you know something is right, you should choose to do it. But as much as possible, we will not force you to do it.”
For more commentary, listen to our recent podcast on digital privacy for public figures with Eric Posner of the University of Chicago and Marc Rotenberg of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.
Nicandro Iannacci is a web strategist at the National Constitution Center.
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