I had one of those “now I’ve seen it all” moments this week as I watched Perez Hilton apologise publicly on YouTube for re-posting nude pictures of actress Jennifer Lawrence in the aftermath of the latest celebrity hack. I mean, we have been talking about privacy going “mainstream” for months, but a guru of gossip’s “genuine” apology for sharing “very intimate” pictures of a celebrity was beyond my wildest imagination. Shortly after re-posting the hacked pictures on his own site, Hilton decided to take them down and tweeted: “No, I haven’t been forced to do so … but I am removing those uncensored pictures ...”

What I found particularly interesting about the apology video was his choice of words. Explaining his initial actions, Hilton said he had been “careless,” didn’t “take a moment to think about repercussions” and didn’t “consult anybody” on his team before posting the pictures. “I genuinely took the photos down,” he said, “because I stopped to think about it.”

Does any of this sound familiar? Let’s put it back in the privacy context. In August 2013, the UK Information Commissioner’s Office released some statistics on data breaches revealing that more than half of the incidents the regulator looked into in the first quarter of 2013 happened as a result of human error and could “invariably be described as careless.”

Perez Hilton’s apology sounds to me like the perfect post-data breach debrief or, if you will, a list of all the things that can go wrong if a “careless” employee handles personal data in an inadequate way: They may act in a haste, not stopping to consider the consequences of simple actions like sending that email or taking those files home and not consulting a colleague—better if sitting in the privacy team—before acting.

Privacy and gossip? Now I’ve seen it all.