Private naked photographs and videos of stars including Jennifer Lawrence, Victoria Justice, Kate Upton, Aubrey Plaza, and Jessica Brown Findlay have been published online after they were hacked from the stars’ personal accounts.
The photos first appeared on the anonymous messageboard at 4chan/b/ on Sunday and quickly spread around the internet, with the anonymous hacker slowly drip feeding the images online.
The hacker is believed to have gained access to the photographs by compromising the Apple iCloud accounts of the stars and their loved ones, in what has been widely condemned as a gross invasion of privacy.
The hacker is reported to have offered to sell the images to online celebrity gossip website TMZ, but leaked them online after they refused to pay the sums requested.
A number of stars whose photos were reported to have been leaked have denied that the images are of them, while others have confirmed that the images are real.
A spokesperson for Jennifer Lawrence threatened legal action, saying:
“This is a flagrant violation of privacy. The authorities have been contacted and will prosecute anyone who posts the stolen photos of Jennifer Lawrence.”
While a clearly upset Mary Elizabeth Winstead commented on Twitter:
“Knowing those photos were deleted long ago, I can only imagine the creepy effort that went into this. Feeling for everyone who got hacked.
“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.”
Victoria Justice has denied that it is her in the leaked topless photos, saying on Twitter:
“These so called nudes of me are FAKE people. Let me nip this in the bud right now. *pun intended*”
Becca Tobin jovially tweeted:
“Merry XXXmas!”
Other celebrities affected by the hack include Ariana Grande, Kirsten Dunst, Hope Solo, Krysten Ritter, Yvonne Strahovski, Teresa Palmer, and McKayla Maroney.
Some of the photos have been removed from image sharing services such as Imgur, and Twitter accounts posting the images have been suspended, but once images are online they become almost impossible to remove due to the international nature of the web and the country-specific nature of legal jurisdiction.
1 Comment
Assuming the photos are real or appropriated, the question is how can any celebrity expect to challenge the internet, the message boards and claim that the photos can not be duplicated? Which is to ask at what point when an individual chooses to store material that can be uploaded on an Apple Icloud service (who then claim ownership) and then somehow disseminated be expected to retain rights over those photos, especially when they are in the business of being a public figure- which is to ask legitimately how much rights does a public figure have of their image and how far can they actually go to control it, never mind the illegal means which said photos were retrieved….