(The following is adapted from a comment I made on Facebook, in response to the argument that the hacked nude photos debacle is analogous to leaving one’s wallet hanging out and having it stolen. It briefly involves badgers.)

Ah yes, a version of the “don’t dangle raw meat in front of a badger” argument. How is putting something online different from leaving cash hanging out of your wallet? Taking the cash requires little to no skill, just a willingness to steal something from someone. Hacking someone’s phone or computer, or even a cloud account, requires much more concerted effort. (Yes, yes, I know it’s easy for some people, but no one is born with hacking skill—they still have to learn how to hack, then make the decision to do so.) Nothing was left “in plain view,” as your analogy would require.

(By the way, I’ve heard the “don’t leave cash hanging out of your wallet” argument applied many, many times to women who get sexually assaulted while wearing short skirts, just so you know the rhetorical company you are keeping.)

Since we are possibly talking about hacks that occurred in the “cloud,” a better analogy would be a locker, or even a safety deposit box. One of the top cloud-storage companies is even called “Dropbox.” We’re not talking about people who left nude pictures of themselves in plain view of the whole world. Several of them had already deleted them, and the rest stored them places that, we have been repeatedly assured, are secure. In fact, we’ve learned that a well-known flaw in iCloud security might have been involved (and by “well-known,” I mean well-known to computer security professionals, not celebrities who happen to own iPhones.) [Ed.: Apple is claiming that iCloud was not hacked, but that multiple individual celebrities’ accounts may have been hacked.] If you want to argue that what happened here is somehow to be expected, then you have no cause for complaint if someone cuts the lock off of your locker at the gym, steals your wallet and your phone, and gym management asks why on earth you would carry your wallet around with you outside of your home.

That only scratches the surface of why your analogy is flawed, but I’ll stop there to give you time to catch up.

(I could go on from there about how people ≠ badgers, but this is good for now.)

Photo credit: By Gary M. Stolz, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.