Someone stole naked pictures of me. This is what I did about it [video] [NSFW]

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/video/2015/jan/21/naked-pictures-this-is-what-i-did-revenge-porn-emma-holten-video

by pmcpinto • 11 years ago

46 69 11 years ago

theguardian.com

_gfrc• 11 years ago

Link to the story, for those who dislike watching videos: http://www.hystericalfeminisms.com/consent/

dstoyanov• 11 years ago

Well if she didn't post her naked pictures in Facebook, even if it was hacked, nobody would get them. Is it not a common sense not to post your naked pictures on the Internet? Especially if you don't want people to look at them...

toothbrush• 11 years ago

Sort of like the argument that you should have had a more solid door, then the robbers would've stolen your neighbour's stuff and not yours.

No, you shouldn't blame the victim, we should be working against the sexist dynamics in society.

cmsj• 11 years ago

If you don't wantto have your car stolen it's common sense to not own a car. If you don't want your money to be stolen it's common sense to be broke. If you don't want your kids to be kidnapped it's common sense to remain childless. If you don't want to be murdered it's common sense to commit suicide.

Of course people should be aware of risks and manage them appropriately, but it's also possible to not blame them for the abuse of others.

probably_wrong• 11 years ago

If you don't want to be murdered it's common sense to commit suicide.

I really dislike this line of thought, because I think it boils the issue down to black and white, all or nothing. "... it's common sense to commit suicide" makes no sense, of course, but how about "... it's common sense not to walk alone at night in a high-crime area"?

I don't believe for a second that she "deserved what she got". But I don't think "do not put naked pictures on the internet" is bad advice either, specially considering the (very) large number of cases in which women's pictures were stolen.

Is there really no possibility for a middle ground?

huehue• 11 years ago

You are comparing mundane things with posting nudes on the net.

nrinaudo4• 11 years ago

Right, do nothing to be ashamed of and nothing can be made public to hurt you.

Given your stance on this, you obviously would have no issue with your full internet browsing history being made public and associated with your real name, the one by which your partner / current flirt / potential employer knows you and might find you, right? I mean, if you didn't want people to know that you're into midget goat porn, you'd just not browse for it, correct?

scribu2• 11 years ago

First of all, nowhere does it say that she posted her pictures on Facebook at all (either to her friends or in a private message), just that her Facebook account, along with her email account, were hacked.

Second of all, as other commenters have noted, you're blaming the victim - the classic "if you don't want to get raped, don't look sexy".

sago3• 11 years ago

Nice victim blaming there.

So she was too dumb, and she got what was coming?

Or even worse, with the "if you don't want people to look at them" hint, perhaps she wanted this. Maybe deep down. Subconsciously or something.

That's a particularly classy form of victim blaming that. Doubly so since you created an account on HN specifically to post it.

blencdr• 11 years ago

Nonetheless not putting nude picture of you on the internet is a good advice anyway !

bruceb• 11 years ago

Just found out about http://www.undox.me this weekend from the 24hr Pando Daily event #dontbeawful

Undox.me has very basic steps of what to do if some horrible person posting your pics without your permission.

onestone• 11 years ago

Sadly another site which assumes that USA equals the world.

leaveyou5• 11 years ago

I made it up to "this were all men" and "this isn't about me, it's about hatred of women" and I remorselessly closed the window as if I stepped into a quarrel that is none of my business. In my universe there is no such thing as "hatred of women" and the psychopathic misogynists are like UFOs. I keep hearing about them but I have never seen any.

nrinaudo4• 11 years ago

dstoyanov, a few comments down, is not a bad example of them.

scribu2• 11 years ago

I think implying that someone is a "psychopathic misogynist" just from a single comment is a bit harsh.

fnef4• 11 years ago

All I see is a comment about being careful about where you upload your naked pictures. I don't see any mention of gender at all.

I'm not sure where you see a suggestion of hatred, of women, or psychopathy.

throwmeunder3• 11 years ago

No. It's the most common and primitive reaction to a preventable problem. Bike stolen? Don't leave it in a bad spot. Mugged? Don't walk through back alleys. Server hacked? Don't listen on all ports. Email? Bad password + reuse.

If you've never been on the receiving end of a similar comment you don't know how irritating and unhelpful it is. It's not malice or hatred .. it's a lack of a different perspective and information.

Squarel• 11 years ago

"There is no hatred of women" is like saying "There is no hatred of [insert other group here]"

If you want to find them, look for the individuals who repeatedly post derogatory comments and hateful comments under any post made by a female.

fnef4• 11 years ago

I challenge the notion that online trolls are genuinely hateful, almost regardless of their target. They're just sadists who find pleasure in other's suffering.

I think it's horrible and these people deserve rehabilitative punishment by law, but it's silly to label it as hate, or, when the target happens to be female, misogyny.

leaveyou5• 11 years ago

I'm not exaggerating here for the sake of the argument but I really don't find derogatory comments toward women in my daily routine reading. I read HN, reddit, tech magazines, blogs, regular newspapers (many local) and most of them have little to none censoring and people say harsh things towards other persons (stars, VIPs, judges, lawyers, cops, politicians for example). I admit I don't read magazines and blogs targeted at women other than by hazard.

mercurial5• 11 years ago

What universe is that? One where all the foaming-at-the-mouth misogynists trolls have had their Internet license of abusing people protected by long distance and anonymity revoked?

The fact that you "keep hearing about them" should give you a hint. Women who come to the attention of a subsection of Internet trolls do find themselves harassed online (death threats, rape threats, etc.). See Gamergate or Adria Richards for recent examples. It's pretty well documented.

leaveyou5• 11 years ago

It's a more sane universe than yours it seems. And I'm going to keep it that way by excluding people like you from it if you can't tone down your aggresivity. I don't know what Gamergate is nor do I know Adria Richards and I don't intend to know all the victims in this world. /ignored

tom-lord• 11 years ago

I keep hearing about Islamic terrorists, but I haven't seen any.

Doesn't mean they don't exist, or aren't causing problems in the world!

leaveyou5• 11 years ago

It's a small word but makes a big difference: "my". In MY universe. The people I know directly. I don't know directly any misogynistic persons nor do I know terrorists and psychopaths. So the subject is not relevant to me and I don't feel guilty nor responsible about what other people do.

leaveyou5• 11 years ago

The fact that I got downvoted 5 times in less than a minute for saying that in MY "universe" (technically that part of the universe that I'm perceiving directly) there is far less abuse and psychopaths than in other's "universes" says a lot about the quality and usefulness of this conversation. Having a dissonant feeling, opinion or view is penalized like you penalize bad behavior in a trained dog. I clearly don't belong to the HN herd and you can shove karma up your a$$. This is just a hypocritical herd praising diversity and political correctness while (self?)governed by some opinion Nazis. So long and thanks for all the fish.

andrey-p• 11 years ago

Autoplaying video featuring nudity. Might want to put a note or two about that.

amelius• 11 years ago

I simply muted sound in my current chrome tab before I opened the link.

Or at least, I fancied that.

DanBC3• 11 years ago

It seems like this could be a useful area for a honeypot.

Take photographs of a willing model (who knows what they're going to be used for); "dox" this model (release the images with fake details); collect information of the harassing people who send messages.

I'm not sure what you then do with the information of harassers.

Ploce in the UK spend a lot of time dealing with online a use. It might account for about half of all calls forwarded to frontline police.

http://bbc.co.uk/news/uk-27949674

zamalek• 11 years ago

I'm not sure what you then do with the information of harassers.

I think the problem would be entrapment. The laws differ from country to country but I'm pretty certain that a honeypot wouldn't be legal here.

Which is unfortunate.

icantthinkofone• 11 years ago

This isn't a case she should be making at all. This is a hacking issue, not any "hatred of women" or anything else she's trying to make it out to be. She's embarrassed and trying to deflect it onto something else. Hacking, yes. Hatred of women and rape issues, no.

I'm also having problems with the video showing the very pictures she was so embarrassed about. There is some sort of disconnect there I don't have time to go into.

tomp2• 11 years ago

This is a hacking issue, not any "hatred of women" or anything else she's trying to make it out to be.

Exactly; if anything, it's love and attraction to women; male nudes are much less popular online.

maxerickson2• 11 years ago

Did you watch the video? Do your parents know ur a slut. is a pretty nasty message to send to someone.

calvin_c• 11 years ago

Objectification and viewing private photos without consent ≠ Love and Attraction

samastur• 11 years ago

Do you find watching images of women taken against her wish respectful?

Pictures shown are not the one that were stolen. Those were the one she took later to reclaim feeling of control. Might not be the way I would cope, but certainly is not a disconnect with anything.

boomlinde• 11 years ago

Surely, having her images spread without her consent and being called a whore upon requesting for them to be removed isn't hacking.

The pictures in the video are also not the ones she was embarrassed about. She explains why she had them taken in the video.

maxerickson2• 11 years ago

There's no disconnect.

Consent: no violation.

No consent: violation.

runarberg2• 11 years ago

Yes, this is precisely the case she should be making. Technology, protocols, and vulnerabilities are ethically agnostic, people aren't (short of psychopaths). There are always going to be exploitations of vulnerabilities, and there are always going to be vulnerabilities to be exploited. But sexual harassment is an ethical issue, that civil humans ought to vomit upon. It ought to be as criminal as trafficking. People doing it shouldn't get away with it, they ought to exposed as the psychopaths they are. Unfortunately in the case of revenge port, they aren't. And worse, by tackling this as an "hacking issue", you are keeping it that way.

bryanlarsen2• 11 years ago

This has very little to do with hacking. Sure there was a hack, but I get the impression she could have dealt with that if it would have ended there. The results would have been the same if it would have been the more stereotypical "revenge porn".

What got to her were the thousands of men who continued to download, share and comment on the pictures.

anon42• 11 years ago

Anonymous people on the internet would call you a faggot cocksucker for much less than asking to have your picture removed from a site. There's no civil communicating with some people and trying to will just hurt you.

The sites distributing her photos should be liable for damages under the DMCA though.

DanBC3• 11 years ago

A burglary case is not about property theft but about weak locks and the need for better windows?

throwmeunder3• 11 years ago

First having your naked pictures out in the internet against your consent is an awful thing that shouldn't happen to anyone. Having your information out in the public eye and emails like the ones she received is terrifying and the more severe problem here.

That being sad I disagree with the whole subtext of the story: that these people get off on the idea of a non consenting victim.

quotes from http://www.hystericalfeminisms.com/consent/: "It’s one thing to be sexualised by people who are attracted to you, but it’s quite another thing when the lack of a ‘you’, when dehumanization, is the main factor."

"Take ‘creepshots’, a global phenomenon which entails photographing women without their knowledge or consent, in order to share them in a sexual context online. On similar sites, people link to Facebook pages asking if anyone can hack or find more pictures of the girl. Here, again, women are used as objects whose lack of consent, of participation, provides the reason and allure of their sexualisation."

"This dynamic is a commonplace online and is a concrete manifestation of a larger discourse around the female body, the notion that it is erotic to sexualise someone who is unaware. We all know the tropes: the sexy teacher/student/nurse/waiter/bartender/doctor. All jobs, if staffed by women, can be sexualised. What is sexy is not the job, not even the woman, but the fact that while the woman is just doing her job you are secretly sexualising her."

Now I am sure there are people that find that arousing but I've just completed high school-university stage and my insight in my peers is a bit different. The people that say stuff like that do it mainly because they find the girl desirable, but have a problem communicating that in a normal way. In other words they are socially inexperienced and that's their way of talking to someone of sexual interest. Overanalyzing this might say that they use insults and threats as a shield to rejection. Pictures of naked people are wanted because they are pictures of naked people. Context matters and in some edge cases may be turned in a fetish but the main allure of almost all "creepshots" is sexual desirability and not the lack of consent.

Similarly I've talked to people that raped and people that were nearly stopped and the reason was always sexual tension(small sample, date rapes, rape = sex/fingering w/o consent). Control? Maybe but not the main reason at all.

anon42• 11 years ago

I think her video is supposed to be more a psychological coping mechanism for herself and other victims, not a solution to the original problem. And it might actually be more important - you need to be mentally stable first and then you can do something about it.

throwmeunder3• 11 years ago

I agree with you. But she's saying things which are, in my opinion, untrue.

It's easy to say "good job, you're stronger than that" and it is helpful. For everyone else that is not in a better mental state there should be an objective discussion from a wider viewpoint.

Anyway, the submission has been flagkilled so I guess HN is not the place for such a discussion.

tempodox• 11 years ago

NSFW. That format is gruesome. I would have preferred something non-noisy, non-distracting, just for reading.

facepalm• 11 years ago

Finally nudes that everybody is allowed to share, because it is supposedly for the greater good. (They were already pushed on me on Facebook and G+, and now HN).

This made me wonder if open source pornography exists?

icebraining2• 11 years ago

http://www.freedomporn.org/

gunnm• 11 years ago

Would DMCA takedown apply in this case? And could she collect damages for non-compliance?

nickthemagicman• 11 years ago

99% of these types photos are of pretty attractive desirable women

So its not "hatred of women"....

Its " hatred of BEAUTIFUL women"!

These men hate beautiful women so much

z3t4• 11 years ago

Maybe sexual education should include computer security too. Now when many people have relations over the Internet. Just like you learn to protect yourself with condoms, you should also learn to protect yourself with strong passwords and encryption.

_yosefk• 11 years ago

You should learn to protect yourself by keeping it offline.

"Strong passwords and encryption" is hopeless because you have a key logger running on your machine - a reasonable, simple default assumption that can and should be taught instead of encryption that only works in theory (and said theory is much too complicated for most people to have time to wrap their mind around anyway.)

Morgawr• 11 years ago

You should learn to protect yourself by keeping it offline.

Those are two entirely different issues though. Just because your house requires keys to enter, it doesn't mean that you shouldn't have a house because somebody might break into it.

Educating people about security of their data is as important as educating them about the ethics and risks of sharing your data, they are not contradictory.