By now, many of us have heard the story of the hacker who broke into celebrity iCloud accounts and leaked nude photos of stars such as Jennifer Lawrence and Kate Upton.

Students are taught that the internet is forever, but that statement extends past Facebook and Instagram. Where do the photos from iPhones go when deleted? If you can get Snapchats’ back after they self destruct, why shouldn’t you be able to get back the photos from your camera roll? Does the trashcan on your computer really delete the file, or does it act like a paper shredder and scatter tiny pieces of the file into space?

Most people do not know the answer to this question and likely assume that because they hit the delete button, the content will not come back to haunt them. They latch onto the idea that something as humiliating as having sensitive information leaked could never happen to them.

Passwords, passcodes, virus-scanning software: none of it has managed to deter hackers. With increasing amounts of social media and technology, reports of hackers releasing sensitive content have become almost commonplace. If people can manage to burglarize high security government computers, what’s to stop them from hacking into a password protected computer or an ambiguous ball of ethernet like iCloud?

Almost nothing. And yet there always seems to be an element of shock when nude photos are leaked from people’s private computers and phones.

Of course, there are those people who supposedly “leak” photos themselves to get the attention, but those people seem to be few and far between.

Whether celebrities or people in general choose to take sensitive pictures is beside the point, and, frankly, their own business, but continuing to save the photos to easily robbed material on devices seems foolish.

If both famous and the average people are going to take the photos–and want them to stay private –they should at least have the common sense to keep them as far away from technology as possible.

Written by Sarah Fornshell’15