How to protect your nude selfies

Protecting Your Personal Information Online

The Selfie Generation
The Selfie Generation

We all have a selfies or two in various states of undress. Come on, admit it. Actually, don’t admit it, that’s the whole point. You should be able to take any type of photo you want with your own phone, your own camera, in the privacy of your home. But with the hacking of many high profile celebrity nudie shots now available for the world to see, everyone is now scrambling to either blame the victims or delete their iCloud accounts. Both of these reactions are ridiculous. Blaming the women for taking the pictures in the first place is just plain offensive, and deleting all your backed up photos or shutting down you cloud accounts is an overreaction.

Protecting Your Personal Information Online

All we need to learn from this scandal is that with new technology that makes our own lives easier, come new ways for hackers and trouble makers to access your personal information and make your life a living hell. For celebrities that mean publishing their private nude photos because that is where the money is. For the rest of us, they probably don’t really care about your nude selfies, but they do care about your bank account. Either way, hacking is all about either getting paid or getting recognition.

Creating an online copywriting portfolio
Online profile

Getting off the grid

Shutting down all your backup and iCloud (or whatever non-iPhone users have) is crazy talk. I know it seems like everyone is watching your every move and that nothing is sacred anymore, or private, and you just want to shut everything down, but you really don’t need to do that. You just have to be smart about what you store online, how you store it, and how you secure it. That means having a hard to crack, random password using all the tricks you can think of. We all know this, we just don’t all do it because it is much easier to remember “Snugglebear,” your favorite childhood toy than it is to remember 5nUgg1b3ar. It is also really annoying and time-consuming to go to all your accounts online and change all your passwords. Oh, that reminds me; don’t have one password for all your online accounts. Yes, it is easy for you to remember, but that also makes it really easy for the hacker once they’ve gained access to just one of your accounts.

Get a password manager

Complexity is your friend when it comes to choosing passwords. With the invention of the cell phone, we can barely remember our best friends phone number anymore, so remembering 6 or 7 new complex passwords is probably out of the question. Luckily there are several password management tools that you can look for online to help you get good secure passwords for all your accounts and they will also help you remember them. It is an incredibly simple and reliable solution to protect all of your private information, not to mention all you sexy selfies. You will also be happy to know that even though there are some questionable holes in the iCloud security, they are working to fix that, but for now, take the security of your personal data into your own hands, don’t rely on others to protect you. In the tech world, where it seems like we’re all coming together as one big happy unity concert, it is really just one big Hunger Game, and it is up to you to ensure your own survival.

P.S. One more thing, if you don’t want to get hacked, one good rule of thumb is to never open emails you don’t trust or click on suspicious links like “nude photos of Jennifer Lawrence” because that is how they get you. When you are wondering if you should click on a link or not, ask yourself the following question: If someone knocked on your door and said (for example) “Hi, I have nude photos of several high profile celebrities, can I come in and show them to you?” Would you slam the door in their face or let them in? You’d slam the door, right? Right?! Anything else would be reckless and irresponsible. So if you wouldn’t let these people into your home, don’t let them in when they come knocking on your inbox.

impressions logo  Good luck, and may the odds be ever in your favor.