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German press mocks EU digital chief's 'stupid celeb' comment

30 September 2014, 21:12 CET

(BERLIN) - German newspapers on Tuesday ridiculed incoming EU Digital Commissioner Guenther Oettinger after he blamed "stupid" celebrities for having their private nude pictures hacked and spread online.

A trove of revealing "selfies" and other images of stars and models have been snatched from Apple's iCloud and posted online in recent weeks in what the tech giant has called a "targeted attack".

Oettinger, asked about the scandal in a Brussels hearing, replied: "If a celebrity is stupid enough to take a nude photo of themselves and put it on the Internet, then they can't expect us to protect them.

"There is a limit to how far you can protect people against their own stupidity," he said on Monday.

News site Spiegel Online said the comment showed that the 60-year-old -- who currently holds the energy commissioner's post -- "has not understood the affair about hacked celebrity images" and judged that "the new post may be too challenging for him".

It pointed out that the encrypted image files are automatically sent by smartphones into the data "cloud" as a backup, and that the images were stolen by criminals.

Spiegel Online added that Oettinger's comment reflected the notion that "if you use the Internet, you have yourself to blame".

The Hamburger Abendblatt also called the comment a "faux pax" while business daily Handelsblatt said the reply showed that "Oettinger lacked the required technical expertise" on online privacy protection.

The Sueddeutsche Zeitung in an earlier article headlined "Oettinger retrains as nerd" asked how the German politician, who had to take English lessons when he came to Brussels, would be able to discuss a technical matter such as "clouds, IP addresses and the future of turbo-vectoring".


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I agree with Oettinger!

Posted by Ben at 01 October 2014, 00:26 CET
It is my opinion that pundits and talking heads are taking Oettinger comments way to literal. He couldn't be more correct in his assessment. Anybody who puts anything in the cloud and thinks its not a risky proposition is, well, stupid. This has less to do with his intelligence or his ability to do his job and more to do with the fact that the current generations don't have reasonable privacy expectations. If we are not smart enough to understand that our smart phones automatically back things up in the cloud then maybe we are not smart enough to have smart phones. At some point we need to start taking responsibility for the risks we take. Oettinger understands this but I guess pointing this out cuts right to the core of many in society.