It was a year of hacks and leaks. The celebrities’ private iCloud images. The Sony hack that laid bear the grimly hilarious dialogue between movie executives. The SnapChat pictures which users thought were deleted. The casually racist and homophobic text messages of a Premier League manager. And with all of that were the continuing aftermath of Edward Snowden’s revelations about the scope of mass surveillance.
It’s a loose amalgamation of stories, each rooted in their own contexts. But there is one particular thread that runs through it: they were just someone else’s problems, and we could observe at a safe distance with varying degrees of titillation, amusement, disgust, anger, sympathy. But there’s an open question about how much people have changed their general behaviour as a result. It isn’t so much that 2014 taught the world that your information is vulnerable, and that given a certain set of circumstance your life could be splashed across someone else’s computer, it’s that it confirmed it.
And yet, when so much daily, personal and business communication is now routed through a variety of servers, there’s a sense that many of us write and snap what we do with a general idea that someone out there probably has your back. Whether it’s your company’s IT department or someone in whatever social network or three you’ve used in the past hour, there must be somebody who, you know, just sort of blocks that stuff from ever getting out.
Or, as the iCloud and SnapChat leaks showed, a message or picture gets sent, and sometimes deleted, and you dust off your hands and go on your merry way presuming that it’s all gone forever.
And amid the extremely serious elements of such leaks there is also an increasingly embarrassing reality highlighted by the Sony leaks and, before it, the Anglo Tapes. If you happen to work for a company that ends up having its digital linen aired in public for whatever reason, then be prepared to be greeted by the ghost of a hurriedly typed message or an off-the-cuff criticism of a colleague.
This is what was so clear about all those leaks. No-one thought these things would ever be seen, heard or read by anyone other then the recipient. Each was personal, each was intimate in their own way (although the iCloud ans SnapChat leaks of naked photos clearly occupy a level for the most appalling violations).
In what remains the early days of humanity’s digital existence — the web is still only 25 years old — this raises fundamental questions about how we communicate online. It’s not just a matter of what pictures are sent, what medium they are sent through, or who they are sent to but perhaps it should now go as deep as what we say every single time we send a text or message.
It tells us we’ve reached a point at which we need to start acting as if there’s someone looking at us as we do it, or that someone will eventually look. That we can hope it’ll never happen, but must presume there’s a chance.
As it is we live in an age where privacy is a malleable concept, in which exerting control over your Facebook settings is still like trying to wrap your hands beneath a water-filled colander. We’re heading deeper into that era now, and the large-scale leaks we’ve seen in the past year – and the very human communications we’ve seen at the heart of them – suggest the age of innocence is already long dead.
It was a year of hacks and leaks. But every year is going to be a one of hacks and leaks. There are a myriad ways and contexts in which the email you sent this morning could end up out there. In 2015, it might be best to just assume they will.