I read an article a week or two ago about a mother that was a former private investigator researching the owner of one of these sites. She claimed that a lot of the women featured on the site had their info gathered by someone hacking their gmail account. I'll search for a link when I'm not at work. Don't really want revenge porn showing up in my search history here.
When has the media ever had a good handle on what "hacking" means and how prevalent it is?
Why would someone with the ability to "hack" a large number of gmail accounts choose nude photos to make their money with? I can't imagine the payoff is comparatively good and large-scale blackmail is a pretty good way to get targeted for prosecution.
Further, aren't these pictures in their email because they were sent to someone? How would the average person distinguish between their account being "hacked" for the purpose of retrieving the picture opposed to the receiver sharing it? It sounds more like the instinctual "my account was hacked!" response to something embarrassing.
Yeah, I know. Done it myself. I was mentally filtering nude selfies out of the set of files I would want to move about. I draw a distinction between "here's a sweet recipe for chicken alfredo, better save this for later" and "here's a picture of me naked, better make a copy in case I need this later", but I guess others don't.
