Shares Rise as Snapchat to Use Nudes to Detect Skin Cancer

Anonymous submission

$SNAP was up 12.1% in after-hours trading following the company’s announcement of SnapDia, a new global business unit that uses artificial intelligence and nude photos sent on the platform to diagnose skin cancer.

CEO Evan Spiegel described the genesis of the idea in a series of continuous ten-second Snap stories. “After embarking on a 3-day meditation retreat, I’ve come to the realization that my product is not making the world a better place,” writes the first Snap story in the series. He continues, “I was brainstorming ideas on my Notion app when I overheard my p-bro Michael Hendricks snickering in the nap pod next door, and I began to reminisce about our college days.”

Spiegel then realized that 30% of the photos sent over the platform are nudes, which means that Snapchat is sitting on the world’s largest training set for diagnosing skin diseases.

Private sources report that CDO Katie Gao actually proposed the idea in the meeting.

SAIR (Snap AI Research) posted to the arXiv a 2-page pre-print of a CVPR paper, which reports a 10% increase in classification accuracy for melanoma lesions, relative to the industry standard. A footnote in the methods section notes that “out-of-sample metrics reported are the best chosen over 10³ random training initializations of the ResNet parameters.”

In response to shareholder concerns over potential HIPAA violations, Snap spokesperson Sara Shapiro released a statement over Twitter. “User privacy is our top priority. We follow industry leaders, like Facebook and Equifax, and store all user data on the cloud. Only Snap employees and their families can access this password-protected data,” she writes. Trusted sources later revealed that the password is “admin”.

Although the market reacted favorable to the news, not all investors are buying. Localized Catalyst (LC), one of the venture-backers of Snap, reported to the SEC its plans to liquidate its shares in $SNAP, following the announcement. “We support our founders through thick and thin. Not all venture capitalists can say that,” tweeted LC partner PB3 last week before the sale. The tweet has since been deleted.

UPDATE: Lauren Sanchez, girlfriend of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, commented on the SnapDia announcement asking when they plan to start diagnosing STDs.