Nude Photo Leak Involving Emma Watson Now Appears to be Marketing Stunt

Ok, pay attention because this is all very confusing.

We know that there has been some hacking devilment at work of late and that certain celebrities have had their cloud accounts pilfered and their private (and nudey) pics stolen and released on t'internet. But it seems that the world of bidness is now using the momentum that these leaks have generated as a form of marketing.

For example, Rantic Marketing are the ones behind EmmaYouAreNext.com. Prior to the latter diverting directly to the Rantic Marketing homepage, it was playing host to a countdown clock to when the "nude pictures" of Emma Watson would reveal themselves. 

My initial thought was "Ah, crap, someone's threatening to leak photos of Emma Watson now, they've a countdown clock and everything. That's really sick." That was followed by "WOW, Emma's managed to orchestrate a guerrilla marketing campaign to bring down 4Chan (that being the site pretty much globally blamed for making Jennifer Lawrence's private selfie collection accessible to the debauched everywhere) despite being really busy delivering the most stirring speech to rouse inadvertent feminists to the UN?! I LOVE her!!!"

And then the final wave of realisation of "Ooooooh. Emma's essentially being used by Rantic Marketing to bring an end to the nude photo leaks, by way of bringing publicity to Rantic Marketing."

I'm not entirely sure how to feel about this. In theory, it's a good thing that - according to Mashable - "celebrity publicists hired the company to popularize a call for internet censorship and the end of 4chan."

According to the slide show now being put on by the marketing company, "EmmaYouAreNext.com" reached over 48 million visitors, 7 million facebook shares/likes and 3 million Twitter mentions worldwide" before asking us to "join them" to "shutdown 4chan and prevent more private photos from being leaked... None of these women deserve this and together we can make a change."

Another woman who really doesn't deserve this is one Emma Watson. 



Maybe I am missing something but shutting down 4chan isn't going to bring about a revolution of gender equality and stop nude photos of famous women appearing on, you know, the internet at large. It's a start, I suppose, but this is all leaving a bad taste in the gob - especially given a Reddit Thread from Tuesday points to a paste bin document stating that Rantic.com, EmmaYouAreNext.com and FoxWeekly.com all happen to be "hosted on the same server or share at least one server in common." This claim has not yet been confirmed by Mashable. 

That aside, and this maybe naivety speaking, but surely there's a better or less damaging way of raising awareness of privacy issues than setting up a sinister website called EMMAYOUARENEXT which gets close to 50million visits... What exactly is that teaching people/hackers with too much time on their hands?

What do you make of the recent slew of celebrity pics that were released? Should celebrities know better to than to take nude pics on their phones or does it not matter what the content is, everyone's privacy should be protected at all costs?