The 24-year-old star of the Australian soap Neighbours (Rachel Kinski) is taking an unusual approach to hacking, by beating would-be nude photo purloiners to the punch. She has set up a website, herself.com, where women can take back their cyber-lives by posting their own naked pics. The idea is to take the power out of the hands of hackers, sextortionists and those bent on revenge porn.
Apple saw a raft of negative publicity in the wake of the iCloud photo leak last fall, where hackers stole and leaked naked pics of top celebs including Sports Illustrated model Kate Upton, singer Rihanna, Spiderman actress Kirsten Dunst and Hunger Games star Jennifer Lawrence. The theft, a brute-force attack that used a set of 500 or so common-ish passwords to randomly attempt to break into accounts, affected about 100 unsuspecting celebs.
And the goal wasn’t just embarrassment: The photos of Lawrence were first posted to popular forum 4chan in a bid to elicit Bitcoins, before finding their way to Reddit and out onto the wider social web. As Lawrence’s spokesperson said at the time: “This is a flagrant violation of privacy. The authorities have been contacted and will prosecute anyone who posts the stolen photos of Jennifer Lawrence.”
Stasey, who will next be seen in the upcoming American historical fiction drama Reign, told the Sunday Telegraph’s Stella magazine that the problem with the hack wasn’t so much the fact that the naked photos were exposed, but rather the lack of consent.
“I thought it was disgusting. Nobody deserves to have their images displayed without their consent,” she said, adding that she has always had a fear that nude photos sent to various boyfriends in the past would be made public without her approval.
So, she decided to flip the script, to remove the leverage that hackers have, and to give women more control of what gets seen on the internet. It remains to be seen how many takers she’ll have for her proposition. “Exhibitionism or cyber-statement?” is sure to be the question – but in the process, she said that she hopes to negate herself as a likely target.
“Now I’ve nothing to worry about because everything I am is everywhere,” she said.