Health

How to Prevent Your Photos From Being Stolen From iCloud

March 16th 2017

In what's already being called "The Fappening 2.0," a new round of intimate celebrity photos has been hacked and posted online.

According to multiple outlets, hackers accessed private images belonging to several actors, including Amanda Seyfried and Emma Watson, posting them on a website.

emma-watsonBigStock/Debby Wong - bigstockphoto.com

The hacks come just two years after the original Fappening, in which nude photos of Jennifer Lawrence and others, were stolen from iCloud accounts.

ATTN: has not viewed the illegally obtained photos, however, according to reports the Huffington Post and TMZ the photos show Watson during a private clothes fitting and Seyfriend during an intimate moment with her boyfriend.

According to TMZ, Seyfried's lawyer has sent an email to the alleged hackers, demanding that they immediately take down the photos, and to "to preserve all electronic and paper evidence in your possession, custody and control relating or referring in any way to: (i) the use or distribution of the Seyfried Photographs, and (ii) the source of the Seyfried Photographs."

Per MSN.com, Watson's legal team is also readying legal action in response to the leaked photos.

It's not yet clear if, like in the 2014 hacking incident, the photos were obtained from an iCloud account. And while the hacking of Watson and Seyfried represents an all too common form of sexual harassment that women should not have to endure, regardless of how safely they keep their personal photos, it is an important (and unfortunate) reminder of the importance of carefully securing cloud-based storage systems.

How do I get and keep my photos off iCloud?

For starters, it's not enough to simply delete your photos from your 'camera' app, doing that only removes them from your device. Instead, you'll need to delete them in the 'photos' app itself.

Photos App

Apple Support explains:

"If you want to remove photos and videos from all your iOS devices, Mac, and iCloud.com, you can delete them in the Photos app.

"When you delete a photo or video from your Photos app, it will also delete from your iCloud Photo Library and iCloud storage. You can recover your photos and videos from the Recently Deleted album for 30 days."

To ensure that all your photos are deleted from iCloud, and that further photos will be uploaded, Apple Support provides the following instructions, go to "Settings > iCloud > Storage > Manage Storage > iCloud Photo Library, then select Disable and Delete."

When your photo stream is turned off, it will look like this:

iCloud Off

Photo Stream off

In the case of the 2014 Fappening, two men, Ryan Collins and Edward Majerczyk, were sentenced to 18 and 9 months respectively for their roles in hacking the photos. According to the Huffington Post, authorities do not believe the men were working together.

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