This message will self-destruct in five seconds… or not

Snapchat, the instant messaging application that has proved a hit with teenagers, is the latest company to be affected by a security breach. The so-called snappening has seen thousands of photos and videos, many of them explicitly sexual and involving minors, posted on the internet. This time though, the blame lies not with the company, but with an app called Snapsaved which, as its name suggests, allows material to be saved. The app’s creators have admitted responsibility and has been shut down.

The scandal should prompt us once again to ponder the question of privacy on the social networks: on the one hand millions of young people are abandoning a Facebook no longer seen as “cool” because their parents and grandparents use it, and also because everything they say on it will be there for all eternity.

At the same time, they fall over themselves to sign up to Snapchat, which promises destruction of messages and photos within seconds of them being sent, even though there is ample evidence to the contrary. Within months of its launch, Snapchat undergoes astronomical growth, such that it is able to reject a $3 billion offer by Facebook, then a rumored $4 billion bid by Google, and is valued at $10 billion, while being described by Mark Zuckerberg as a “super-interesting privacy phenomenon.”

And herein lies the paradox: from the moment the first users began to try out Snapchat it was perfectly clear that it was very easy to retain photos and messages, either by quickly photographing the screen with another phone, or via a screen save (no easy task, and one that required holding the thumb down on the screen to see the snap, but far from impossible, or by using apps that soon appeared specifically for the purpose.

Offer developers a supposedly impossible challenge and they will come up with a solution, especially if there is money to be made. What’s more, Snapchat itself showed in January of this year that its security systems were not exactly watertight and that the supposed privacy it offered could be violated relatively easily.

And so many Snapchat users installed the app so as to be able to overcome what they had initially seen as the service’s competitive advantage: that their messages would only be seen once, for a few seconds. Snapchat went out of its way to trawl through the App Store and Play Market, finding such apps, and reporting them for violating the terms and conditions of the service, and for the danger they represented. But there is little to be done when a certain product is in demand. And following the success of its first product based on the concept of the self-destructing message, Snapchat itself launched other versions that allowed messages to be stored, but the outlaw apps remained popular.

Here’s the question: if just about everybody knew that Snapchat’s privacy was an illusion, and that there were any number of ways to save messages, why did people continue using it to send photographs and movie clips of a sexually explicit nature (a euphemism if there ever was one)?

The answer would seem to be that people wanted to believe it. In other words, millions of young people around the world starting using the service not on the basis of any real guarantees of security, but because the service was sold on the basis of the premise of security. And of course the fact that their friends were using it, which is always a key driver in adoption of new technologies.

The case offers an interesting insight into how technology markets work: getting people to adopt something isn’t about actually providing this or that function, but simply pretending to, getting people to believe that it exists, telling a story that sounds sufficiently convincing, even though it would stand up to any real scrutiny. It’s enough to promise something for people to believe you, and in the case of Snapchat to upload all kinds of personal and confidential material.

Unawareness? Gullibility? Misplaced trust? Fashion victims? All of the above? Whatever the reason, I fear that this will not be the last such case…

(En español, aquí)