Celebrities fire your technical advisers:
- Hire someone who still views the cell phone as a device to make phone calls, not a gadget to send smiley faces. If your current tech adviser can’t keep his or her head out of their iPhone, fire them.
- Go out and buy a digital camera, the ones that store pictures on secure digital memory cards. View said pictures on any modern laptop, do not transfer them to the laptop’s internal storage. Keep sensitive pictures neatly tucked away in a safety deposit box under lock and key.
- Avoid cloud storage solutions that keep your data on external servers. Instead look at personal cloud solutions, where your data is only accessible by you, not by some NOC employee bored at 3:00am with hours left in his shift.
- Social media is a curse, those million followers can turn on you in a heartbeat. Control your web presence, build a personal website, avoid comments. We don’t need to know what you ate last night, or your every move, zip it.
- Last thing, very important. Once a digital image makes it out to the web, it’s impossible to quash. If some brash technical adviser or hot-shot lawyer claims they can fix it for you, see them out the door.
The internet is comprised of many application layers. There is the web of course, the shiny sites we visit everyday via HTTP. Any lawyer can keep legitimate sites from showing your leaked images, but there are file transfers (FTP), newsgroups (NNTP), chat rooms (IRC) and emails (SMTP) actively sharing those images as I type.
If the internet wasn’t bad enough, let’s add telephony services to the mix. Right now text messages (SMS) are spreading the word and multimedia messages (MMS) are spreading the images. Billions of phones are jamming cell towers with leaked image traffic, storing said images in their respective picture folders which inevitably make it out to cloud services.
Think before you click.
He says, “It’s three a.m., there’s too much noise
Don’t you people ever wanna go to bed?
Just ‘cause you feel so good, do you have
To drive me out of my head?”