When I first heard of Snapchat a few years back, I knew that people would use the application to send each other explicit images. A lot of people still use it for that reason, and in a lot of ways, it’s the perfect application for sending pictures you might not want the other person keeping.
Instead of sending a picture in a text message, and instantly regretting it, users can remain guilt free and content that their images have disappeared after a certain amount of time. And for the most part, that’s how the application has worked since its inception. Since the application has grown to be so popular, a lot of users only just use the application to send harmless selfies as a way of communicating with their friends. In a sense, it’s like Instagram, but a private chat program.
Many of these pictures might not be the most visually appealing, but that’s part of the charm. Users like Snapchat because their images disappear. That’s why it is so disappointing that Snapchat has altered their privacy policy to allow them to keep and distribute user pictures if the company chooses to do so. This new privacy policy mainly affects the new Live Story integration, despite other generalized claims from well-known websites. However, I can guarantee that most people using this new feature might just expect their photos to be deleted from servers similar to when they use other functions of the application.
Snapchat’s updated privacy policy comes in a new app update released on October 28th. To download the newest version, users might agree to the new privacy terms. By agreeing to the new terms, users are granting Snapchat’s Live Story pictures worldwide, perpetual, royalty-free, sublicensable, and transferable license to “host, store, use, display, reproduce, modify, adapt, edit, publish, create derivative works from, publicly perform, broadcast, distribute, syndicate, promote, exhibit, and publicly display that content in any form and any and all media or distribution methods (now known or later developed.” Snapchat also doesn’t fail to mention that some services can render Snapchats primary function of deleting images after a timed limit useless.
The new Live Story functions allow users to submit Snapchats to be displayed to thousands of users. It’s similar to sending something to Instagram, with a #hashtag–except it’s more curated and selected. For those concerned about private Snapchats, what they said in the past is still relevant. It outlines that “once [they] detect that all recipients have viewed a message, [they] automatically delete it from our servers.”
Like all forms of collected user data, Snapchat will most likely benefit from this change by making more money from advertising. The main new feature that appears alongside this privacy change gives advertisers the ability to post ads among live stories. While the privacy change doesn’t affect users using Snapchat to send private photos, it is still concern for users expecting photos sent through the Live Story function. These photos will be kept by the company as data instead of expiring after 24 hours of viewability that the function has.
Another new update to the privacy policy is how they log information. This new log information collects the pages that you visit before navigating to Snapchat. That said, this seems to be referring to pages within Snapchat itself. Since the policy includes such a vast array of information and doesn’t specify exactly which service or pages, there certainly seems to be a frightening gray area. This has led many users to be skeptical, or just plain confused, on the company’s new privacy policy.
As with all free services that rely on you inputting tons of data and sending it around, you shouldn’t expect total privacy. We’ve outlined other providers like Hola VPN who were selling user’s bandwidth–and everyone knows how much information Facebook and Google stores to target users with advertisements. Snapchat isn’t that different, after all.
We’ve created some great resources on how to protect your privacy online through search engines, and other methods.