“Do you really know where your photos are? While this news story will undoubtedly focus on the privacy violation for the celebrities involved, and the mechanism by which this hacker was able to carry out the attack, there’s an underlying shift in the technological landscape that will continue to enable the scale of these kinds of breaches to expand, for both celebrities and corporations.
The evolution of data stored in one physical location until intentionally moved or copied, to seamless cloud synchronization and mixed online/offline interactions, creates a near total lack of transparency for the average user into where exactly their data is. When you take an action on your phone, and it synchronizes to your laptop and tablet, that data is almost certainly going somewhere else, being stored and backed up. Each of these locations and systems in which the data exists creates a vector for attack that must be protected. We are largely at the point where nothing you do on your iPhone can be considered private.”