Actor Tom Hardy says he continuously changes his phone to protect his privacy and says that the ongoing threat of hackers is “painful.”
“The Revenant” actor takes serious cyber security measures, he revealed to The Evening Standard.
Hardy says he regularly buys “burner”phones—cheap pre-paid cellphones—which he later disposes of.
The “Dark Knight Rises” villain revealed that he is frequently hacked, which is why he uses private, offline servers to safeguard his personal data from hackers.
Hardy says he does not use Apple’s storage program, iCloud, following a leak in 2014 of celebrities whose private, and sometimes explicit, photographs were leaked. Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton, and Ariana Grande were among the individuals affected by the 2014 hack.
“We get hacked all the time,” Hardy told The Evening Standard.
“People go on to messengers and try to set up accounts with profiles,or try to get into the phone itself, or they get hold of the number and they start fishing about, and my family as well, anyone I’m related to,” he said.
“You just have to bin and burn the phone and start again, we have to go through burners. We’re burning numbers left, right, and centre,” said the 38-year-old Oscar nominee.
Hardy previously used an iPhone and a Blackberry but now uses a £11,400 titanium-panelled Solarin by new tech firm Sirin Labs which offers “military-grade” encryption.
“I‘ll burn numbers and then I’ll have private offline servers for my email accounts,” he added. “It’s quite painful when you think about, we’re quite normal people in that aspect.”
“My mum and dad don’t need to have their photos of stuff gone through or any of their private messages just because people want to find or piece together something maybe prurient or salacious, and even worse take money from people or move things around.”
Hardy says he takes serious precautions because he wants to protect his two children.
“There’s personal information, which is vulnerable-making for me, and I don’t want people knowing about my kids,” he said.
“I want to protect my children and that’s one level, but on another level for business—if you’re dealing with quite a considerable amount of investment in a franchise and you’re moving editorial, imagery, and pictures of stuff which hasn’t gone out yet, then you’ve got to protect that,” Hardy said.
