The Snapchat Secret: The Exchange of Access To Social Media Now Comes At A Pretty Heavy Price.
A Look at Surrending Privacy For Access to Social Media Platforms like Snapchat.
The Snapchat Secret: The Exchange of Access To Social Media Now Comes At A Pretty Heavy Price, originally titled Terms and Conditions: Why I Tell People Not To Use Snapchat Filters, was written by Alex Auguste and published to GoodKnocking.net on June 30, 2016.
This piece isn’t about why Snapchat is bad. This post is, instead, about people’s willingness to give up everything they fight for — mainly privacy — for access and connectivity to others, even when it comes at an intangible price. Social media is constantly changing in ways that expand how we think of conneting with others. As it continues to do so, the world has more eyes watching, streaming, liking, posting, and sharing.
This is an uncomfortable truth: people have been giving up the rights to privacy in exchange for access. I could go into a long-drawn out lecture, but I shouldn’t have to, really. We’re talking about privacy, which allows us to feel secure and aware of our surrounds and what’s happening to us. In times of quick-access and cyber connectivity, privacy and security are among users’ concerns across every platform, device, and service. Yet ironically, we’ve seen an increase of platforms requesting the forfeit of privacy in exchange for access. The crazy thing, though, is all this in the context of social media is completely voluntary. In a way.
When was the last time you read the terms and conditions of a social media platform?
Well, if you’re a Snapchat user, you’ve received a new update to the terms and conditions once a year since the service first launched. You’ve probably never noticed how little you’re granted as a user, and how much content ownership you’ve given Snapchat. Here’s a look:
“Many of our Services let you create, upload, post, send, receive, and store content. When you do that, you retain whatever ownership rights in that content you had to begin with. But you grant us a license to use that content. How broad that license is depends on which Services you use and the Settings you have selected.”
The services in question: the filters. The live, and animated filters users can bring upon their face require facial recognition and calibration, and Snapchat makes it very clear that once done, they now hold the licensed ownership to use your face how they please, because you allow them to.
…You grant Snapchat a worldwide, royalty-free, sublicensable, and transferable license to host, store, use, display, reproduce, modify, adapt, edit, publish, and distribute that content… In addition to the rights you grant us in connection with other Services, you also grant us a perpetual license to create derivative works from, promote, exhibit, broadcast, syndicate, publicly perform, and publicly display content submitted…you also grant Snapchat and our business partners the unrestricted, worldwide, perpetual right and license to use your name, likeness, and voice solely in Live, Local, or other crowd-sourced content that you appear in, create, upload, post, or send. This means, among other things, that you will not be entitled to any compensation from Snapchat or our business partners if your name, likeness, or voice is conveyed through Live, Local, or other crowd-sourced Services.
In short, your face now belongs to Snapchat, and its partners, and is kept in an LED lit jar in a basement for use in any way known now or in the future. Not to mention, requiring no compensation to you.
For this specific reason, I, on the rare cases that I use Snapchat, do not and will never use the Snapchat filters, which include the face swap, the dog filter, laurel, purple haze, light beam eyes, the Bob Marley filter, and whatever crazy and strange additions they may come up with.
Sections 3, Rights We Grant, and Section 4, Rights You Grant Us, vary in length widely and, in conclusion, only grants users access to the Snapchat network and its services. As for Section 5, Your Privacy, you’re given this very brief statement:
Your privacy matters to us. You can learn how we handle your information when you use our Services by reading our privacy policy. We encourage you to give the privacy policy a careful look because, by using our Services, you agree that Snapchat can collect, use, and transfer your information consistent with that policy.
So, before you start this month’s newest conspiracy theory about how the government wants us to focus on Kanye West’s “Famous” video as a way to distract us from federal battle between the CIA and Apple’s users’ privacy, fight your own privacy battle.
The only solution I might come up with if you’re one of the many users who’s now become the 2016 Face-Off sequel victim, you might want to deactivate your account and write Snapchat to possible void out the terms of their policy.
The exchange is widely disproportionate, but ultimately, like any contract, it doesn’t seem like anyone is reading the fine print (which is actually not fine at all). The only other factor may be that people are OK with all this. In the case of the latter, it may point to a new, evolving idea of what we deem as a risk to our privacy. Surely, it’s not a social security, or a credit card, or a personal identification number, but it’s your face and your voice which, in simplest, is the most human way to identity (or misidentify) you.
There you go, Snapchat users, you’ve been told. Now go out and get your face back!
