I won’t share you…

Want to avoid compromising photos of yourself popping up on the interweb? Tips below!

There are lots of things that us normal people don’t have in common with Hollywood celebrities.

We don’t have pet tigers, we can’t charter a private jet to deliver us a takeaway and we tend not to sign million pound deals with glossy magazines to photograph our weddings.

Whilst it’s true that we’re unlikely to bump into Queen B whilst we’re at Aldi, this isn’t to say that there aren’t things that sometimes happen to celebrities that could just as likely happen to us.

I don’t mean uploading a video to YouTube that wins us a record deal to be Justin Bieber, I do mean though as has recently happened to Jennifer Lawrence and others, storing compromising photos on the web that may find their way into the public domain if your security settings aren’t good enough.

This is what appears to have happened to a host of A-Listers over the past couple of days, hackers have used their geek skills to illegally access cloud* based storage services such as iCloud and download their private content then posting it openly on the interweb.

What can you do to avoid falling into the same trap then? Here are three very sensible tips –

1. Don’t store compromising photos of yourself online – If they’re not to find in the first place, this won’t happen.
2. Make sure your security settings are sufficient – Don’t go for obvious passwords, review the permissions you’ve granted to apps and transfer photos to secure storage. See more tips here.
3. Don’t store compromising photos of yourself online – Again, don’t do this.

That this has happened is a reminder that whilst lots of good comes from the internet when it’s done right (cat videos etc), lots of bad can come from it too if care is not taken to be sensible when snapping away in your trailer on the set of some movie trilogy. Be warned!

* What is the ‘cloud’? It tends to mean storage space offered by a website which allow you to upload your files to a web-based service rather than saving them to your computer. That’s as best as I can describe it – truth be told, nobody really knows what it is or where it came from. It’s not dissimilar from the black monolith thing in 2001.