I'm not going to delve into the (un)desirability of certain other issues here such as certain items being on a cloud or what should not be. Let's say it was confidential business documents.
What we can do is take electronic literacy a lot more seriously than we currently do. None of the celebrities targeted in this attack are stupid. In fact some, like Jennifer Lawrence, are intelligent. But intelligence is no defence against a subject you don’t care to understand.
Easy saying it. But why not then insist anybody coming near anything resembling a button (or an Apple product) do an online certification first. Insist that companies do full disclosure of how their products work while we're at it to avoid some future statement that might say "but you should have known the x-th
ALXMin
FDIR sector should never be a opposite to the delta of the
JHGF ...". Maybe they all know how Wireshark/tcpdump works, what war driving is, how too reverse malware damage, analyze the packed bit ... Oops, no wait: Then some of us would not have jobs and we'd be sued for reverse engineering. Then the corporates would also not be able to sell so easily.
The thing is this: It's easy blaming a user for something they did not know about nor could have foreseen. First there is a brand loyalty and trust (very misplaced sometimes) that big corporate X will always do the right thing and are simply infallible. The more tech savvy may see things a bit realistically. I'm extremely glad that Jennifer Lawrence is extremely intelligent, but that's irrelevant apart from implying that other users aren't.
The bottom line is, were an Apple salesman asked how secure their cloud is prior to a sale and this incident, you would have heard it's impenetrable. While it may be (but probably isn't) impenetrable, sometimes the problem is not with the user either, but those linked to the user. The user is also placed between a rock and a hard place. What if my phone is stolen? Why, simply use this little app and you can even see where it is, disable it etc. Yet on the flip side large corporates with their extreme desire to invade our daily lives with extreme tracking has forced us to disable features like geotracking etc, rendering that little app unusable. Ever seen what is imported automatically if you enable a Gmail account on your Android phone? There we go down the slippery slope again.
The more cynical have a saying "There is no patch for human stupidity". The realist knows that even at a stage the most intelligent and cynical party will make a mistake. The likelihood of that mistake occurring is directly proportional to the complexity of the product. And let's be honest, our little pocket rockets are quite complex and powerful with many hidden features, some by design, some not.
But blaming the end user for using features mandated in products is easy and probably the corporate plausible deniability.
