If you’ve been anywhere near the Internet in the past few months, there’s a good chance that you’ve heard of an event dubbed “The Fappening” or “Celebgate,” where an anonymous iCloud hacker uploaded nearly 200 nude photos of multiple celebrities, including Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton and Victoria Justice, to 4chan. The photos soon made their way to sites like Imgur and Tumblr, where they were re posted far more quickly than they could be taken down.

Reactions from the Internet varied. There were a few dissenting voices, like the ones who lambasted Perez Hilton when he shared the photos on his blog. But from what I saw, the vast majority of the web not only condoned the hacking but also enjoyed viewing and sharing the stolen images. Within a day of the original posting, more than 100,000 Reddit users subscribed to the subreddit, which is a content entry organized by area of interest, used to share leaked photos, and it received more than 250 million views before Reddit banned it, according to a September 2014 article on Forbes.

I find it ironic that these are likely the same people who complained when the National Security Agency (NSA) spying scandal was revealed to the public. In fact, according to a June 2013 Gallup poll, 53 percent of Americans said they disapprove of the government’s tracking of telephone call logs and Internet communications. How can we as a society praise Edward Snowden for revealing the NSA’s invasion of privacy while in the same breath, celebrate over the release of private photos of Jennifer Lawrence naked?

Lawrence recently did a cover story with Vogue calling the hacking “a sex crime”, which at first seems like a strong condemnation—perhaps too strong. After all, she’s famous enough to know the risk of leaked photos. Doesn’t that make it her fault in the first place?

This line of thought hearkens back to victim-blaming. It doesn’t matter who took the photos or why. Posting anyone’s nudes without permission is a blatant, sickening and creepy violation of privacy. Suppose Jennifer Lawrence wasn’t an Oscar-winning actress, but your girlfriend, sister or close friend. Wouldn’t the leak make you sick? Wouldn’t you feel deep, compelling disgust for those who found and shared the photos? The fact that she’s a celebrity doesn’t make a difference. Being an A-lister doesn’t make her any less of a human being with a right not to have her body exploited.

The “Celebgate scandal” is just one facet of a widespread epidemic, though. As mobile tech and apps like Snapchat (which by the way, definitely doesn’t make your photos “disappear forever”) become more popular, they make sexting easier. A study published in the July 2012 issue of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine found 28 percent of 14 to 19-year-olds have sent naked photos of themselves over text or email. With this comes the very real possibility of revenge porn, when exes post explicit images of former partners online without consent, usually with the intent of shaming the victim. One of the first revenge porn sites, IsAnybodyUp, averaged between 150,000 and 240,000 unique page views per day in 2011 before being shut down, according to a 2012 article by The Village Voice. That could be 240,000 people looking at a photo intended for one person to see, and given that the photos were often accompanied by personal information like full name and address, harassment was certainly an issue as well. Twelve states have already passed laws criminalizing revenge porn, but Indiana is not one of them.

It seems obvious that there will be more leaks in the years to come—both of celebrities and everyday people. We have  yet to realize bodies are not public property. Next time you’re tempted to click on an explicit photo that you don’t have permission to view, stop and think about how you would feel if the person in the photo was someone you cared for deeply. Or  better yet, just do the straight-up decent thing and remember that whoever is in the photo didn’t give consent for you to look at their naked body. Then X out.

The views in this column do not necessarily reflect the views of the HiLite staff. Reach Miriam Hu at [email protected].