Internet trolls are at it again, and this time you do not have to be famous to be exploited!
Snapchat, an app that – let’s face it – is basically for sending racy pictures, hypothetically without them being able to stab you in the back somewhere down the road by self-destructing in a matter of seconds, is not to blame for the leak. You can all stop writing your strongly worded letters to Snapchat customer service. Instead, Snapchat says you can all blame yourselves, or rather those of you who use third party Snapchat apps such as snapsaved.com to save pervy pics without the sender knowing. You know who you are.
According to The Guardian, 13 GB of Snapchat content was leaked with what is estimated by the world-class geniuses over at Reddit, about 100MB of which were actual nudes. The Huffington Post further posted that since about 50 percent of Snapchat’s users are between the ages of 13 and 17, it is likely that a good amount of those nudes are child pornography.
“The Snappening,” perhaps related to “The Fappening,” the recent exploitation of personal celebrity photos, are suspected to both be orchestrated by the same hackers, although nothing has been proven yet and nothing probably will.
While police opened investigation on “The Fappening,” no arrests were ever made, and the whole ordeal seems to have been brushed under the rug and forgotten.
Now, I do not find it fair to blame the victims. Everyone should feel safe to send pictures of their anacondas and hot-cross-buns to their lovers and friends if they want to, but it is 2014, and the idea of privacy is practically folklore by now.
So here is some realistic advice: until the world is a perfect place (don’t hold your breath), think about who you are trusting, and with what you are trusting them. Today, “who” is not as simple as a boy or a girl anymore, it is also a cellphone service, iCloud, apps, anything social media and the strangers that are trying to find their way through security holes.
Our world is so taken over with technology and an obsession with documenting every single thing that I think we forget that it is possible to be sexy and interesting without social media. If you want to shake it online and you just do not care, good for you! Own it, and be the sex goddess you were meant to be! If not, that is okay, too. There are fun and creeper-proof ways to express your freaky self. Give your partner a private show in person, walk around your house naked, buy some frisky undies from Victoria’s Secret but then go commando, or install a pole in your house and take up pole dancing for a hearty work out.
That being said, I am all about getting your freak on, but for the love of God use some common sense.
