iOS 14 Will Help Stop Accidental Oversharing
Every time I see someone’s name I know on the Trending Topics on Twitter, I know that unless its Keanu Reeves, its never for a good reason. Today, there was a name that every super hero movie fan knows well, that sat on top of those Trending Topics all day long.
I almost always click on the name, to find out why they are trending. My first hope is that they haven’t died.
After being relieved that they are still alive, I’m hoping that its that they happened to have done something great. Worthy of smiles and giving thanks. This is where Keanu usually comes in. Dude is always being great.
Generally though, its not for either of these reasons. Unfortunately, it’s due to them saying something stupid, racist, ignorant, or in the case of most of them, a combination of all of the above.
Today was one of the rare reasons for someone’s name trending. In fact, its only happened a couple of times that I’m aware of (though the list is growing): the dreaded leaking of “nudes,” as is the general term for such photos online. In this case, the celebrity actually leaked his own. And no, this wasn’t a case of someone who purposefully did so for publicity — someone who has quite literally saved the world, no, the universe, doesn’t need the publicity.
From what I’ve gathered, this “leak” happened when the star shared a screen recording (video) to his Instagram and didn’t trim off the end of the recording that ended on a view of his camera roll. A view of his camera roll that, well, had some…personal photos on it. He has since deleted the video, and I’m sure his publicist is having a busier Saturday than they had planned. Based on the comments I’ve seen online, this is actually probably only going to further his career, and make the list of people wishing to date him, grow in size.
Before some of you get high and mighty about taking such photos, hush. No one wants or needs your opinions on what you feel is proper and okay. Victim blaming is never okay.
While not all of you may have such pics on your devices, I suspect you all have some photos you would prefer not be accidently shared online. Perhaps you have memes that are in poor taste. Maybe you’re someone who needs dozens of selfies in a row to get one that you feel is good enough to post (I’m a single shot type of guy — why mess with perfection). The truth is, just because it is on our phone, doesn’t mean that it needs to be everywhere our phone goes.
I have good news on this front: starting with iOS 14, which comes out this fall or iPhones and iPads, our devices are going to help protect us from oversharing.
Going forward, each and every time you go to post media to an app, you’ll be prompted with the above notification. Before, you either gave an app access to all of your media, or none of them. Now, you can select to allow only a handful of photos to be available, and it can be on a per app basis. Perhaps you only want photos of your dogs to be available to Twitter (They’re all good dogs, Brent), while Instagram can only see your trendy sunset pics, and Facebook only has access to your political memes (seriously, I miss the days that was just photos of people’s babies — such a simpler time).
This fine tune control won’t stop every unintentional leak, or accidental overshare, but it does provide us all with that extra step of “are you sure you want to share this?” Now, if only we could get that for what we say to the people around us .
Stay safe out there.
