Saturday, December 28, 2024

Gisèle Pelicot - The Breachies 2024: The Worst, Weirdest, Most Impactful Data Breaches of the Year

The New European [unpaywalled] – Our 2024 Person of the Year has changed the rules, reversed the language and given women permission to reject shame …

But then Gisèle Pelicot did the unthinkable. She demanded that the court show the tapes to her rapists and journalists while she faced her attackers. She stared the rules in the face and challenged the decision and sat in the courtroom facing her rapists. And she has won. 

She changed the rules. She held her head high and gave us permission to reject shame…Gisèle Pelicot did not let her rapists look away. She did not let the court look away. She did not let the world look away and in doing so has radically altered the conversation. 

She told the court in Avignon she wants women who have been raped to know that “it’s not for us to have shame – it’s for them”. It is like the world I operate in shifted on its axis. Gisèle Pelicot’s radical act of rebellion hasn’t just impacted her trial. It has shone a flashlight in the dark corners of my mind where I still blamed myself for violations.   It has done what years of therapy and working in violence against women was not able to do. It has altered how I view my own experiences and how I treat the woman in the mirror. 

And in doing so, also erased the hypocrisy I have felt in being able to recognise other women were not at fault, but not giving myself that same respect and grace. I am done being ashamed or making excuses for the men that violated my boundaries…”


The Breachies 2024: The Worst, Weirdest, Most Impactful Data Breaches of the Year


EFF: “Every year, countless emails hitour inboxes telling us that our personal information was accessed, shared, or stolen in a data breach. In many cases, there is little we can do. Most of us can assume that at least our phone numbers, emails, addresses, credit card numbers, and social security numbers are all available somewhere on the internet. But some of these data breaches are more noteworthy than others, because they include novel information about us, are the result of particularly noteworthy security flaws, or are just so massive they’re impossible to ignore. For that reason, we are introducing the Breachies, a series of tongue-in-cheek “awards” for some of the most egregious data breaches of the year. If these companies practiced a privacy first approach and focused on data minimization, only collecting and storing what they absolutely need to provide the services they promise, many data breaches would be far less harmful to the victims. But instead, companies gobble up as much as they can, store it for as long as possible, and inevitably at some point someone decides to poke in and steal that data. Once all that personal data is stolen, it can be used against the breach victims for identity theft,ransomware attacks, and to send unwantedspam. The risk of these attacks isn’t just a minor annoyance: research shows it can causepsychological injury, including anxiety, depression, and PTSD. To avoid these attacks, breach victims must spend time and money tofreeze and unfreeze their credit reports, tomonitor their credit reports, and to obtain identity theft prevention services.   This year we’ve got some real stinkers, ranging from private health information to—you guessed it—credit cards and social security numbers. The Winners:

Posted by at