Disgusting anonymous website hosts forum for leaked UConn nudes

This needs to stop

At first glance, Anon-IB is like any other image board site, think 4Chan.

And its topic list seems to be restricted to porn genres. If you scroll down past links to “Anal” and “Milf”, you find a list of US states.

Except this site isn’t your average porn exchange. It’s a site heaving with “revenge porn” – pictures of ordinary people, mostly nude, posted without their permission.

Despite being nauseated by the idea of the unsolicited posting of someone’s nude photographs (just on the principle of respect of privacy alone), I decided this was something that needed to be investigated.

And my stomach sank when I saw Connecticut, home of the Huskies, and a thread devoted to UConn.

Part of the front page of Anon-IB.

Although I was hesitant to go any further, I clicked on. What I saw was multiple threads, most of which were titled as town names, most with several posts each (thankfully, the number of posts was included on the site’s catalog page, so I didn’t have to passively engage in exactly the type of behavior I’m condemning).

The UConn thread consisted of 77 replies and 27 images when I looked.

Typical thread on Anon-IB, black bars indicate use of names

The following image is an example of a typical post (mind you, the original image featured a non-nude person’s casual snapchats). I did not scroll down far enough to see anything that I would describe as “leaked nudes”, but I felt that due to the nature of the website, their existence was inevitable. 

I began to feel slimy just being on the site, so I decided to exit out of the tab and do some outside research. According to the web traffic analytics tool SimilarWeb, the splash page of Anon-IB received an estimated 290,000 visits in December 2015 alone.

Anon-IB is distributed onto several different websites, each with domain names with endings like .co(Colombia), .ru (Russia), .la (Laos), and even .su (The Soviet Union, which was dissolved in 1991 FYI)— further complicating the issue of ever having the site taken down or their servers seized.

As I continued my research, it became apparent that Anon-IB had previously been a website, but was taken down for some unknown reason. The site had hosted images from “The Fappening”, a term used to refer to the mass of leaked nude images of celebrities released in 2014,  most of which were stolen from iCloud accounts.

The difference between this incarnation of the site and the last is that this site doesn’t just feature Oscar nominees and your usual porn fare, but your classmates, your friends, and maybe even your sister or daughter.

They even have a Twitter account

Anon-IB surprisingly does have a rules page, and on it there are two rules. Rule number one is “no images containing minors” which is not only entirely unenforceable due to the anonymity employed on the site, but also—show me the difference between yourself at 17 years and 11 months old and 18 years old.

Rule number two is “don’t be evil” which means no sharing last names, addresses, phone numbers, etc. What the admins at Anon-IB fail to see is that the nonconsensual sharing of confidentially sent nude images of someone is inherently “evil”, or at least, a gross violation of privacy. To quote the FAQ from endrevengeporn.org:

“Victims who do make intimate images available to an intimate partner have entrusted another person with sensitive information.

This is no different from customers giving their credit cards to waiters, or patients giving their sensitive health information to doctors.

Waiters and doctors who abuse this private information by giving it to unauthorized individuals face criminal penalties.”

With the dawn of the Internet a new frontier for the facilitation of human interaction was created, and just like other newly discovered lands, the Internet is fraught with factions possessing differing systems of ethics.

Like at other new frontiers plagued by illegal and immoral activity in the past, something needs to be done about the complete disregard for the privacy, dignity, and safety of Internet users.

While writing this piece, I experienced the ethical dilemma of whether I should include the URL of the site or not. I have chosen to display the site URL so as to retain the integrity of the piece and also so that those affected may take action.

For more help or information see: The National Sexual Assault Online HotlineCyber Civil Rights InitiativeCenter for Missing and Exploited Children

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