Contrary to popular believe there is a lot you can do to protect yourself from having your intimate pictures and videos stolen.  The first thing is STOP PUTTING THEM ON THE INTERNET.  When you save those files to that fancy Mac computer it uploads them to iCloud to back them up (Windows users, don’t get smug, there’s plenty of services to do this on Windows as well).  This means that they are on the Internet.  At this point you are asking for trouble.  If it is on the Internet you can assume that someone is going to attempt to find it and share it.

If you are going to put the files on the Internet via iCloud, DropBox, Cubby, etc. then encrypt the files.  If they are encrypted it will be a LOT harder for someone who downloads them to view them.  They can share them all they want, but without your encryption key they won’t be able to see the data in the files.  Now if you aren’t involved in technology this probably sounds pretty hard, and it can be but if you’ve got files that you really don’t want to have out there for the public to view, then it’s probably worth an afternoon of your time to learn about this stuff so that you can protect yourself.  Do some reading, take a class at the local community college, buy my book, there’s lots of options available to you.

If you have these sorts of pictures and videos that you don’t want online, grab an old computer, disconnect it from the Internet, and put the files on there.  Use this machine for only those files, and never connect it to the Internet.  Odds are you don’t plan on sharing those files with anyone besides yourself, so having them on a computer which can’t get on the Internet probably isn’t a big deal.  If you loose those files is it that much of a problem?  After all you can always take new ones, and that’s most of the fun anyway, right?

After you’ve got your files encrypted you still need to do things like put a pin number on your cell phone, put passwords on all of your computers (especially that one with the naughty pictures on it), and use two factor authentication for everything that allows you to including your email, blogs, websites, banks, etc.  Of all of these your email is the most important one to have two factor authentication for, as this is where all the other services will send password reset messages to.

Now for the love of god, remove all those pictures from the Internet before you do anything else.