SnapChat, scandals and Snappenings.
If you’ve never heard of SnapChat, and we’re guessing you have, it’s an online mobile service that is marketed as a way to allow users to send images to one another on the proviso the image will be deleted “forever” after a handful of seconds.
Of course this is a little misleading, as many SnapChat users have been aware for a while now that the image recipient can take a screenshot of any incoming image, thus saving the photo into their photo album. SnapChat even alerts the sender that their image got “screenshotted”.
What many user’s didn’t realise however is that there are a number of other different ways of getting a hold of the image without the forced deletion, even bypassing the notification SnapChat sends to alert the sender.
One of these ways – via the use of third party websites – was bought to the limelight this week in an event dubbed “The Snappening” (anyone familiar with the leaked photo scandals last month will know where that name came from) whereby one of these third party websites got their servers compromised, resulting in thousands of SnapChat photos getting leaked into the public domain.
The service in question, SnapSaved allows a recipient of a SnapChat photo to go to the SnapSaved.com website, before they open the SnapChat photo, and save the photo, ensuring it doesn’t get deleted. SnapSaved, as it turns out, saves these photos on their own data servers.
And it is these photos that have been leaked across the Internet this week. The problem being is that many of these photos are intimate photos of a user-base where the most popular ages are 13 to 17.
Just like the celebrity leaked photo last month, this latest scandal is down largely to the victim’s being a little to blasé with information they don’t want public…
To repeat advice we seem to be giving a lot recently, nothing you upload onto the Internet is immune to being copied and distributed without your permission, whether it’s a mobile account, a social networking profile or through an app that promises to delete your data, like SnapChat.
They’re all vulnerable to people not playing by the rules, so always think twice before you upload something online that you don’t want getting into the wrong hands.
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