Offering advice on taking “safe and sexy selfies” is certainly an attention-grabbing way to launch a new company, but there’s a good reason why privacy consultancy the Hit Team is offering an infographic guide on the subject.

Clients in need of the company’s services are those who didn’t know how to safely manage sensitive images and now find themselves the object of blackmail threats that the images will be posted publicly. Or they may be people who discover the content is already online in increasingly common “revenge porn” incidents.

It’s not just an issue for celebrities with hacked phone accounts. While some people might find the idea startling, surveys have shown that sexy selfies are now a mainstream activity.

If they are leaked onto the internet, the Hit Team (www.thehitteam.com) will work discreetly to get the sensitive items – typically, images or videos – removed from social media sites, apps, internet forums, file-sharing sites and search engines, says Hit Team founder Fergal Crehan, who launched the business last week in Dublin. He says, of course, that not all sensitive content is self-created and that sometimes images or videos are made without the subject knowing about it.

The victims are almost always women, he says. The perpetrators are generally men: ex-husbands, ex-boyfriends or casual sexual partners. The women are threatened with having the images or videos of themselves posted online or find they are already publicly available, sometimes showing up on Google searches of a woman's name.

Women tend to look for more symbolic ways of getting back at someone, he says. For example, they’ll damage something their former partner valued or throw belongings out of the house. But they rarely post explicit content featuring their former partners.

Public shaming

When women find sensitive content about themselves posted online, they are understandably very distraught, says Crehan, who has dealt with several such cases as a barrister specialising in privacy and data breaches.

In one case, a woman who had been unsuccessful in numerous job interviews was advised by a friend to Google her own name just to see if something might come up that could be damaging her employment prospects. To her horror she found a former partner had posted explicit material online which was appearing at the top of searches on her name.

“It’s a form of public shaming and lack of consent is the motivation,” says Crehan. “It’s not a prurient interest in the images, it’s a power interest, invading someone’s privacy. It’s not necessarily a sexual thing, more a way of causing embarrassment.”

Although Crehan has a broad knowledge of privacy issues, he will not be acting as a legal representative for victims via the Hit Team. However, he will bring in third party legal support if needed, as well as other experts.

Crehan says it was his experience as a barrister that made him realise that most cases can and arguably should be resolved without any need to go down the costly and time-consuming legal route.

First, most people really should not want to go to court, he says, as doing so risks drawing greater public attention to the sensitive material victims are trying to have removed and don’t want people to know about.

That said, Crehan says there is public misunderstanding about such situations, a belief that when it comes to tackling embarrassing content posted online by others, there are no rules or laws. Or people think the reverse: that the only possible route is to go directly through the courts.

Neither is the case.

User guidelines

Pretty much all the services and platforms that might host sensitive content have user guidelines that clearly state that users cannot post explicit material, post such material without consent or violate someone else’s privacy in this way.

However, it can be difficult to navigate those services and go through an often complex process of requesting material be taken down.

“There’s also an emotional energy required in doing this,” Crehan says. “In the vast majority of cases, we can do that for them.”

Also, within Ireland, victims are more likely than not to successfully get material removed before needing to take legal action.

"What makes it possible to do this here is that most of the major internet platforms are here [such as Google, Facebook and Twitter]. That's because Ireland is very pro-business and an English-speaking country and the perfect jumping-off point to Europe. But because Ireland is in Europe, it also has European data protection laws" that provide specific privacy protections.

“The companies here are perhaps more amenable to discussions than their US base operations, mainly because they have to be. The operations here are smaller and can be more approachable.”

Europe also now has a limited “right to be forgotten” in which people may ask to have search engine links to some types of online content removed, making it much harder to find that material.

Embarrassing explicit content posted without permission in order to humiliate another person would be the type of content search engines would see as falling within that right.

“This kind of material isn’t a matter of historical record. It’s not censorship to get rid of it, and there’s no right to know everyone else’s business,” says Crehan.

Anyone in Europe, protected by the same laws, can use the Irish-based service, and Crehan hopes the Hit Team’s Irish location will be a Europe-wide selling point.

Protections

Potentially, someone in the US might find it useful too, as services might be more willing to take down material if approached through their Irish office by a European advocate.

US citizens do not have the same data and privacy protections nor a “right to be forgotten”, but might argue their reputation could be damaged in Europe by the material being available online, Crehan says.

However, in general, he says material can be removed under the user terms and conditions of the service. An Irish company is thus just as able to act on a person’s behalf to accomplish this as an American company.

Ideally, though, the material wouldn’t make its way onto the internet in the first place, hence Crehan’s infographic. If you’re going to do sexy selfies, at least do safer sexy selfies.