The price of fame is always increased scrutiny, but for any celebrity who does venture out in public, mere scrutiny has now given way to ongoing surveillance. The need for privacy is not only a sacred place to work out who we are, what we do or how we think; it’s a psychological refuge from overwhelming public dissection necessary for anyone’s mental health, famous or not.
For those who have ever anxiously untagged a lurid photo of themselves splashed across Facebook, please, then, consider the insidious implications of the latest celebrity hacking scandal.
Actor Jennifer Lawrence, star of the Hunger Games franchise, is one of more than 100 celebrities who have learned overnight that even their own phones have been recruited to the surveillance against them. Over the past few hours, news outlets have run a story alleging a hacker has used a security leak within the cloud data storage system to access the private mobile phone data of numerous celebrities. The data the user is sharing on sites like 4Chan are intimate photographs of celebrities taken by or for their lovers. Lawrence’s representatives have confirmed that the photographs are real, as have Ariana Grande’s. Actor Mary Elizabeth Winstead took personally to Twitter admonish her violators: “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.”
It’s not merely tawdry that the private sexual conversations of partners are now being disseminated like memes. Sharing these images is not the same as making a joke including characters such as Doge, Grumpy Cat and Sad Keanu. It’s an act of sexual violation, and it deserves the same social and legal punishment as meted out to stalkers and other sexual predators.
Violation it is, too, because whatever the medium of communication between lovers (whether it’s a telephone call, a text message or the sexual act itself), the conversation is private and to intrude upon it is sexual involvement that has occurred without consent, and it has the same resultant harms. That a mobile phone used to facilitate a lovers’ conversation can also be used as a means of mass communication is irrelevant, because mass communication was in no way agreed to by the lovers, who had every right to believe their security would not be compromised. Actors and other entertainers may certainly offer their image to public consumption as their professional practice, but what they are not trading is their intimacy.
There are suggestions that prosecution may result not only for the hacker of the photos, but for those who view and share them. Good. To excuse viewing the images just because they’re available is deplorable. It’s the equivalent of creepily hiding in a wardrobe because a conversation may be taking place you’d be interested, excited or turned on to overhear.
