Identity theft is only one of many misconducts that, with the popularization of the Internet, started to occur online. Though similar, as it involves stealing personal data, the purpose of hacking differentiates from creating a fake persona. In her article, Why Do People Hack?, Carol Finch describes various reasons for such activity, one of them being especially relevant in cases of the famous being the victims:
“Some hackers use their skills for criminal activities. On a personal level, a hacker might break into someone's computer and take control of it -- this could give him access to passwords and financial information that he could then use to defraud the individual. On a larger scale, groups of hackers might target companies as part of a wider criminal operation. For example, in 2014, a group of Russian hackers accessed systems in various companies around the world and stole over 1 billion usernames and passwords from over 400,000 websites.” (Finch, 2015)
The vulnerability of well-known American women to being targeted by illegal hacking to can be illustrated by the example of Celebgate, a 2014 controversy, where numerous female celebrities fell victim to an organized picture leak.In the summer of 2014, users of a popular image board-type forum, 4chan, began publishing personal, mostly nude, pictures of female celebrities. As it became obvious that the images had not been previously shared by the people depicted on them, the situation was understood to be a leak, either coincidental or intentional.
Eventually, it turned out that the published pictures had been deliberately stolen. An online cloud service, iCloud (a part of Apple Inc.), was found to be the “culprit”; the later investigation revealed that the hackers exploited the service's insufficient security measures which allowed them to guess any user's password, thus gaining access to the stored data. The even had been given the name “Celebgate”, an obvious implication to The Watergate scandal; the idea originated from the people responsible for the leak.
Celebgate, as an example of an invasion on famous women's privacy, can be examined in various aspects, including, inter alia, the motive of the hackers, and legal consequences of such misdemeanor. The description of the original actions of the individuals accountable for Celebgate should help one correctly discern the subsequent events, as well as the case itself.
The person officially charged with illegally obtaining the pictures was Ryan Collins, a Pennsylvania resident, whose methods are described in detail in an article published two years after the incident by U.S. Attorney's Office in California:
“He sent e-mails to victims that appeared to be from Apple or Google and asked victims to provide their usernames and passwords. When the victims responded, Collins then had access to the victims’ e-mail accounts. After illegally accessing the e-mail accounts, Collins obtained personal information including nude photographs and videos, according to his plea agreement. In some instances, Collins would use a software program to download the entire contents of the victims’ Apple iCloud backups.”
Apple itself provided an explanation as to why individuals other than those contacted by Collins beforehand were also subjected to the hacking, shedding a light on the technical side of the problem:
“After more than 40 hours of investigation, we have discovered that certain celebrity accounts were compromised by a very targeted attack on user names, passwords and security questions, a practice that has become all too common on the Internet. None of the cases we have investigated has resulted from any breach in any of Apple’s systems including iCloud® or Find my iPhone.”
The characterization of the process raises two substantial issues: the aforementioned mistakes in security precautions taken by the creators of Apple's storage system, and the seemingly effortless practice – involving the victims' participation - that let Collins collect the information necessary to temporarily take control of the accounts he was interested in. The first point, being a technical issue disrupting the usage of a product, is distinctly connected to the legal proceedings resulting from the incident, while the second has a psychological and societal basis.
Using Apple's - an international, well-known company - products, rarely raises concerns in a user, as a business this size appears to have gained trust of many. A customer, in many cases rightfully so, does not suspect such corporation to have problems securing the content stored by the user, let alone allowing a third party to view and copy it, unbeknownst to the owner.
In their research, Xin Li, Traci Hess, and Joseph Valacich (2008) provide an explanation as to why users remain unsuspecting of any technical issues:
“When the trustor has no prior interaction with a trustee, he/she cannot develop trust based on direct experience with or first-hand knowledge of the trustee. Instead, the trustor will depend on other sources, such as second-hand information, contextual factors, or personal intuition to make trust inferences. For example, before having direct interaction with an information system in a specific context, a trustor can build initial trust in this system based on their experiences with other systems, their knowledge about this system used in other contexts, and/or others’ opinions about the system.” (p. 41)
Such prevalent and understandable conviction seems to be one of the aforementioned factors - that are rooted in societal beliefs - which made an incident like Celebgate possible. Yet, it is not just the victims of the leak who were afflicted by Apple's mistakes; Collins, after discovering the security loophole, had decided to use it to his own advantage.
In an interview with Marlow Stern, one of the victims, actress Teresa Palmer describes her experience and attitude towards the leak, as well as a specific connection between her gender and falling prey to Collins:
“It was difficult,” says Palmer. “It certainly was such an invasion of privacy, but also scary on a universal level that nobody’s stuff is safe. Thank god for me I didn’t really have anything too risqué, but it’s really scary to know that I have so many photos of my son, my birth video, all of my stuff that I know is in the hands of someone that’s hacked into my computer.” (…) “You know what’s so unfortunate?” Palmer says. “All the women got together and talked it out. We all had photos of boyfriends—some are famous, some are not—who are naked, and none of the photos of famous men were ever released. It was all women. So, it was a personal attack on women, and trying to shame women. I just think it’s disgusting that there were no men—I think there was only one male victim—so women were specifically targeted.”
It is important to pay attention to how Palmer reacts to the idea of being vulnerable to having private data published against her will: she calls it “scary”, which supports the claim that companies like Apple have the reputation of being trusted providers of expected services.
Interestingly, the actress' ordeal mirrors another famous' woman struggle with her image being used against her will. In the further part of the quote, Teresa Palmer stresses that it was not just pictures of her that were exposed to Collins; stored were also images of her son, which, though not illicitly published, were also viewed by an unapproved party. This claim resembles what Aimee Gonzales, the victim of catfishing, admitted happened to her children when Angela Wesselman decided to impersonate her online – even though the minors' identities were not stolen in the same way as their mother's was, they were also indirectly involved in the process. This instance yet again demonstrates how a child can suffer collateral consequences, however small, of the actions of those who decide to target the mother, whether to fulfill their personal agenda (Wesselman), or to induce a controversy, as in Collins' case, causing troubles for both the victims and the provider of the service.
The last part of the quote, in which Palmer mentions even more people concerned, gives one an insight into the hacker's mind and motive, as from the perspective of a person affected. According to the actress' statement, the women whose accounts were hacked, also kept saved private pictures of their male partners, whose depictions were similar to those of the victims. Nonetheless, none of the pictures were leaked. Palmer understands this as an example of a perpetrator specifically targeting women in order to put them in a situation that might expose them to ridicule and humiliation. She does not, however, fully explain her logic as to why she believes so. Roxanne Gay, a writer for The Guardian, in an article related to the Celebgate, provides what Palmer failed to in her interview. According to Gay:
“It’s not clear what the people who leak these photos hope to achieve beyond financial gain and a moment of notoriety. (...) These hackers are not revealing anything the general public does not already know. BREAKING: beneath their clothes, celebrities are naked. What these people are doing is reminding women that, no matter who they are, they are still women. They are forever vulnerable.”
Teresa Palmer concludes her talk with Stern with a clear statement:
“I’ll be in the bath with my son and my husband will take a picture of us. I’ve just given over to the fact that, ‘You know what? This may end up on the Internet' (...) I think I have a pretty healthy perspective on it, but I know some of the other girls were really traumatized by it.”
Unfortunately but obviously, not all victims eventually reacted to the leak with such confidence. One of them was a popular actress, Jennifer Lawrence. In an article for Vogue, Ellie Davis reminds the reader what are Lawrence thoughts on being targeted by Collins:
“When I first found out it was happening, my security reached out to me. It was happening minute-to-minute - it was almost like a ransom situation where they were releasing new ones every hour or so,” (…) I feel like I got gang-banged by the f***ing planet - like, there's not one person in the world that is not capable of seeing these intimate photos of me. You can just be at a barbecue and somebody can just pull them up on their phone. That was a really impossible thing to process.” (Davis, 2017)
The easiness of sharing the pictures, mentioned above by Lawrence, calls into question the issue of trust once again. This time, however, it can be described from the perspective of Collins. The hacker, besides his technological knowledge, has used persuasion to obtain any information necessary to access the pictures. Marian Friestad and Peter Wright (1999) describe the aim of the technique used by Collins. Their explanation might be linked to that of Li, Hess, and Valacich in an instance that the hacker used the well-known name of the company to convince the victims to provide him with desired information. In this case, however, the trust in security measurements was deliberately taken advantage of by a single person, and not just by the users' belief that Apple's precautions were sufficient. According to Friestad and Wright:
“Persuasion knowledge (...) is an especially important interpretive belief system because it tells people about situations where an intelligent purposeful outside agent is skillfully trying to alter their inner self (their beliefs, their emotions, their attitudes, their decisions, their thought processes) and thereby alter the course of their lives. (...) The resources that enable someone to competently manage the numerous influence attempts that other people direct their way are their personal persuasion related beliefs. Individuals who allow unnoticed or uncontrolled invasions of their internal psychological world, and consequent changes in their behaviors, do not survive and prosper.” (p. 186)
The cases described above relate to a violation of privacy where a personal, private data, previously stored within websites that mainly provide related services, was involuntarily published on an image-board type page, consisting of anonymous posts and users. Both domains – iCloud and 4chan - however, are not widely understood to be a part of personalised, customisable social media profiles. Whereas, after discussing the origins and course of Celebgate, one can undoubtedly state that the leak has greatly contributed to how the victims perceive their online presence, and how it has affected not just their Internet activity, but also their sense of intimacy, the responses, reactions, and role of utilities like, amongst many others, Twitter and Facebook, cannot be omitted or underestimated.
To support the claim of what constitutes social media in the first place, it is apt to familiarise oneself with how Thomas Poell (2013) defines it:
“Social media can be roughly referred to as a "group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of the Web 2.0 and that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content" ([20], p. 60) The quick rise of social media platforms in the first decade of this century was part of a more general networked culture where information and communication got increasingly defined by the affordances of web technologies such as browsers and search engines. Social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn as well as user generated content sites, including YouTube and Flickr, became the core of a host of web-based applications that together formed an expansive ecosystem of connective media.” (p. 5)
The “quick exchange of user-generated context” can be understood as crucial in describing a female celebrity's experience. Since social media allow users to easily portray themselves in a desired way by sharing text, pictures, and various other types of data, it can also, paradoxically, enable others to depict the famous in any chosen way. Again, such actions bear a resemblance to catfishing; however, the aim differs from creating a fake online persona, as the content revealed during celebgate hack shares even more features with the phenomenon of “revenge porn”.
Scott R. Stroud (2014), besides explaining what the foregoing term represents (revealing private materials, previously shared between consenting individuals, usually after their relationship has come to an end), specifies the incentives behind it:
"Posting revealing photos of non-consenting others along with identifying information potentially leads to humiliation, embarrassment, and could increase the potential for online and “real life” harassment. (...) This harm is enabled by the anonymity provided to the posters of this information, and those who run the sites that allow for such posting. As research on user-generated content for news sites has determined, anonymity often increases incivility and immoral behavior (Singer & Ashman, 2009)." (p. 9)
Clare McGlynn and Erika Rackley (2017) compare the phenomenon to sexual abuse:
"Advances in technology have transformed and expanded the ways in which sexual violence can be perpetrated. One of these new manifestations of violence and abuse is the non-consensual creation and/or distribution of private sexual images: a phenomenon we have conceptualised as image-based sexual abuse." (p. 1)
The issue of being anonymous, mentioned in the first quote, can undoubtedly be attributed to social media as well. Since it has already been discussed what triggers one to act accordingly in circumstances characteristic to the events surrounding Celebgate, it is essential to describe the consequences of the behaviour.
The statements from Teresa Palmer and Jennifer Lawrence concern their feelings related to the hack itself, not their attitude to appearing on social media afterwards (although Palmer provides the reader with the idea on how she hopes to deal with the aftermath of Celebgate, she focuses on her daily life, simply revealing that she is now aware that any type of personal data might get stolen and uploaded online). While the two women are, undoubtedly, not the only ones that concentrated mainly on the fact of being subjected to Collins' shenanigans, and not the direct reactions of others, their way of coping with the trauma in the media should be considered to be as legitimate as the response of those who chose to publicly share their views on the engagement of Internet users and followers with the case, since methods of dealing with stress vary greatly according to one's personality and numerous psychological traits.
The experience of another victim of Collins, actress Mary Elizabeth Winstead, gives one a detailed insight into the struggle of online presence following the leak. Winstead used her Twitter account to voice her concerns and describe her attitude at that time:
"To those of you looking at photos I took with my husband years ago in the privacy of our home, hope you feel great about yourselves."
"Knowing those photos were deleted long ago, I can only imagine the creepy effort that went into this."
"Going on an internet break. Feel free to my @s [mentions] for a glimpse of what it's like to be a woman who speaks up about anything on twitter"
These three simple messages (in 2014 Twitter's 140 characters limit still existed) thoroughly describe the actress' approach to the situation. She feels not only that her privacy and personal freedom have been violated but also does not understand why users are interested in content that was never intended to be viewed by third party. Winstead is also surprised with the effort put into looking for the photos even after most of the copies have been removed. Finally, she informs that she is not going to respond again, stating that the reaction to her posts is what a woman in a time of stress is likely to experience from her online following, and other users, curious about a given case.
Bernie Hogan (2010), however, appears to have answered Winstead's question concerning the users motives to keep looking for the pictures: "To expect privacy online is not to imply that one has something worth hiding or a presentation that may contradict one’s role in other spheres of life" (p. 4). The author suggest that the interest was fueled by the actress' general image: in the opinion of the public, Winstead was never considered to be a person that would agree to appear in such pictures; such impression had probably been caused by the woman's public demeanor and the impression that occurred from it.
While Winstead's reaction might have seem harsh and incited by anger, another actress afflicted with the hack took a less exasperated, however still firm approach. Yvonne Strahovski, whose career, similarly to Palmer, flourished in the US, chose Instagram to publish her statement:
“It is with great sadness and disappointment that I address this hacking issue. To my fellow actresses whose privacy has been invaded – my heart goes out to you. I'm so disappointed that there are people in the world who feel the need to commit these criminal acts. Some of these pictures are fake, my own included. Regardless – I ask you all – do not share the links. Don't even look at the photos. Just let people have the privacy they deserve. Integrity is sacred.”
The response, besides calling for respect and voicing Strahovski's attitude towards the person responsible for the leak, also suggests yet another issue the woman had to face: despite the pictures being fabricated, there was still the need to address the situation.
Obviously, a person unfamiliar with photo processing might not have been able to recognize the pictures to be fake. This might be understood as beneficial, since the actress' privacy has not, in fact, been invaded. Nonetheless, even if Strahovski's plea not to distribute the links prevented a given number of people from seeing the pictures, those who have already viewed them were not certain to also see the discussed Instagram post, and therefore remain under the impression that they have come across a genuine depiction of the actress. In such case, the woman has not been hurt directly by having her privacy violated, but by false assumptions that lead to both reactions similar to those Winstead experienced, and having been wrongly accused.
Carolyn Hole, Naomi-Ellen Speechley, and Ross Burnett warn of the severity of the described kind of situation:
"It is apparent that for those wrongly accused the effects are likely to be devastating(...) they may have a substantial impact. Some allegations (...) may still affect their subjects’ employment or standing in the community. Others may be aired in employment tribunals or family courts, and even when they are not substantiated, their consequences may be severe. (...) Significant damage may be done to alleged ‘perpetrators’ in circumstances where there has been no finding of guilt." (p. 4)
To conclude, violation of privacy in a form of illegally obtaining private data is yet another factor that a famous American woman's social media experience comprises of. Albeit similar to catfishing, its reach and effects are considerably greater, as events like Celebgate involve not just one person (or a small group of people) that is meant to be deceived, but the victim's online following, as well as a global audience, interested in the situation. Such leaks create a sense of doubt in security measurements of even the biggest Internet storage providers, which, along with the feeling of humiliation (especially when confronted with direct comments) and uncertainty (in many cases related to the fear of losing business opportunities and inability to pursue chosen career path), might make social media usage more of an ordeal, than a pleasant and work-facilitating activity.
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