- Where Are Your Digital Photos Stored?
- How to Break Into an iCloud Account
- Keeping Your Photos Safe from Thieves
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Keeping Your Photos Safe from Thieves
Now that you know how easy it is for cybercriminals to break into your online storage accounts, how can you keep any of your sensitive photos from being stolen? There are a number of approaches you can employ, which we'll discuss in order of simplest to most drastic.
Resist Phishing Attacks
The first line of defense is to keep the bad guys from getting hold of your password. At its most basic, this means not giving it to them yourself.
In this regard, you need to make sure you don't fall victim to a phishing attack. Since most phishing scams start with an official-looking but unexpected email from some familiar company or website, be aware of all such emails you receive in your inbox. Never[md]I repeat, never[md]click any links in any emails you were not expecting. If you think there's a legitimate reason to contact that company or website, then manually enter the official URL into your web browser. Do not click through on any email links[md]and if you do, do not enter any information on the resulting web page. Period.
Create a Strong Password
Next, you want to make your password impossible to guess and difficult to crack. That means creating a long and seemingly random password, composed of a combination of letters, numbers, and special characters. The longer the password, the more difficult it is to crack, even with sophisticated password cracking software; the more seemingly random the password, the harder it is to guess.
As to random, do not base your password on any information personal to you, such as your birthday or pet's name or favorite color. Doing so makes your password too easy to guess. In fact, you're better off if your password doesn't contain any recognizable words or phrases[md]even the most crude password cracking software knows to cycle through all the words in the dictionary when doing its guessing.
In addition, you need to create different passwords for each account you have online. I know, that's a pain in the posterior to do (and to remember them all!), but if reuse the same password for multiple accounts, anyone cracking into one of your accounts can break into them all. That's not a good thing.
Enable Two-Factor Authentication
There's another easy way to increase the security for all your cloud storage accounts. The key is to enable two-factor authorization for each account.
Two-factor authorization, which is offered by Apple, Dropbox, and most other services, requires you to enter both your password and a unique (for each session ) PIN when accessing the account. The PIN is either texted to your mobile phone for that session, or generated by an app on your phone. Even if a miscreant guesses or steals your password, he won't have the unique PIN required to open your account. It's the equivalent of using two locks on your door instead of just one.
To set up two-factor authorization for your iCloud account, go to My AppleID, select Manage Your Apple ID, then sign into your account. Click Password and Security then, under Two-Step Verification, select Get Started and follow the onscreen instructions from there.
Turn Off All Online Photo Backups
Even if you take these steps, it's still possible (although less likely) that a malicious individual with the right technical skills could break into your cloud storage account. The problem, really, is that your photos are stored on a service over which you have zero control. If Apple or Dropbox or Google Drive is hacked, your photos could be stolen.
To best protect against whatever may happen to your cloud storage service, just don't store your photos online. If you don't put them out there, nobody can steal them. It's as simple as that.
The problem is, by default every photo you take with your iPhone is stored not just on your phone, but also on the iCloud service. Photos you take on an Android phone are similarly automatically uploaded to Google Plus. You're probably not aware of this, which is why the whole iCloud photo theft thing came as such a big surprise. Even though people may have deleted those photos from their phones, the photos still existed online. (Everything exists forever on the Internet, after all.)
To keep your photos from uploading themselves to the Internet, you need to turn off your phone's automatic cloud backup feature.
For iPhone users, you disable this automatic uploading by going into your phone's Settings screen. Tap iCloud then scroll down to Photos and slide the option to Off. (You can also just delete your iCloud account entirely, by scrolling to the bottom of the screen and tapping Delete Account.)
If you have an Android phone, open the Photos app, display the Options menu, then tap Settings to display the General Settings screen. Tap Auto Backup, then uncheck Back Up Local Folder and slide the top-of-screen Auto Backup switch to Off.
Delete Existing Photos Stored Online
The preceding steps will keep your phone from automatically backing up any new pictures to the cloud. But what about any older photos stored there?
If you have some old photos you want to erase from the cloud, you have to do so manually. Open up your iCloud or Google Plus or Dropbox photos on your phone, then individually delete those pictures you don't want haunting you in the future.
On an iPhone, you access these photos by opening your Photo Stream. Once you delete a photo from your Photo Stream, it's removed from every Apple device and service you use[md]except the device you used to shoot the original picture, of course. If you want to delete the original photo, open your phone's Camera Roll and delete it there.
Don't Send Your Sexy Photos to Anyone Else
Here's something you probably don't think about if you do any sexting. Any photo you send to anyone else[md]either via text message, Instagram, or email[md]is now totally out of your control. You can delete it from your phone, you can delete from your cloud storage service, but you can't delete from the phone of the person you sent it to.
What can happen to your sexy picture after you send it to a friend or significant other? Well, if you happen to break up with that person, he can get peeved enough that he shares it with other people, or posts it on the Internet for everyone to see. That's how a lot of celebrity nude shots get leaked, by old boyfriends and girlfriends.
Even if the person you send it to is more honorable than that, that person's phone could be stolen, or someone could hack into that person's cloud storage account just as they could yours. Every person who has access to your photos is a potential security threat, even if unintentionally so.
The solution here is also simple. Don't send your embarrassing photos to anyone else. Of course, that takes a lot of the fun out of taking embarrassing photos, but if you truly value your privacy, you'll keep your private parts private. Anything you share can be stolen from you.
Don't Take Embarrassing Photos[md]Period
Finally, the ultimate advice to avoid having nude pictures of yourself show up online is to not take any nude pictures of yourself. This isn't meant to excuse the thieves who like to steal such photos, but if you don't have anything to steal it can't be stolen. If you've never been photographed in the altogether, you don't have to worry about pictures of you sans clothes showing up anywhere.
So cover it up, people! (And if you can't cover it up, then protect it as best you can.)