The Fappening has certainly changed the way many celebrities — and also quite a few civilians — approach nude selfies.
Within the last couple of months an unprecedented number of celebrities got their phones hacked and, with them, a considerable amount of naked pictures they’d taken privately became very public. Cloud storage apps like iCloud and Snapchat turned out to be very vulnerable to hackers and suddenly millions of people were left wondering how to handle their particular nude selfie situation.
Naturally, some people swore off taking revealing pictures of themselves, but let’s face it, nude selfies were probably the main reason digital cameras were invented in the first place. As long as there is a camera that can instantly show its user an immediate image, naked photos will be a commonly used feature. The issue that needed to be addressed was clearly an improvement in security.
Unlike the infamous cloud storage options that would upload the user’s photos to a server, a new app called Hidely claims to protect your nudity-filled images by keeping them in a locked double encrypted box on your own device, and this can only be accessed via password using the Hidely app.
“Almost everyone has photos on their phone that are meant to stay private,” said Jeff Chen, founder and CEO of Hidely. “We’ve seen too many flagrant cases of privacy invasion, so we wanted to introduce a solution that restores a sense of security, and puts people at ease knowing their content remains under their complete control.”
Even if your phone got stolen, they still couldn’t reach your pictures, because Hidely leaves no trace of them on your camera roll; you would need the (password-protected) app to open the file.
Other apps like Wickr have gone for the temporary option of giving a short expiration date to a file and making it disappear right after, but while that may be extremely convenient for other types of secret messages, a huge part of the fun of nude selfies is the ability to… you know, revisit those pictures on different future occasions. Hidely allows you to go back to your favorite shots as much as you want.
The extra security requires a minimum amount of responsibility from Hidely users, though, as passwords can not be recovered. If you forget your password, you might as well forget about those safely kept images, too. That may sound a bit harsh, but think about it: if you can’t handle the small accountability that comes with remembering a password, then perhaps sharing nude pictures was simply not for you.
For all the rest of you, Hidely can be downloaded for free on the iTunes App Store.
