The Federal Trade Commission finalized its settlement with Snapchat Wednesday over the company’s allegedly false advertising that photos and videos sent through the social app are permanently deleted. Snapchat will be forced to create a stricter privacy agreement and adhere to it for the next 20 years, The Hill reports.
The FTC’s original complaint, from May, accused Snapchat of deceiving its millions of users “with promises about the disappearing nature of messages sent through the service.”
The idea for Snapchat, according to brogrammer lore and the founders’ very fratty text messages, originated in a conversation about sexting. Users’ photos and videos sent via the free app are supposed to “disappear forever” after being viewed for a few seconds. If the recipient takes a screenshot of a message from his device before it disappears, Snapchat is supposed to notify the sender.
But the FTC found that photos sent through the app can easily be saved with third-party apps and services, while videos can be copied by connecting a recipient’s device to a computer. (Buzzfeed gives you a visual walkthrough here.)
These third-party applications are often poorly managed and can provide less security for users’ content than Snapchat itself. In October, some 200,000 images were leaked after one of these services, called Snapsaved, which allowed people to store unopened Snapchat photos without the senders’ knowledge, was hacked.
Although that leak did not come from a breach in Snapchat directly, the app has been criticized for the way it stores—but not deletes—old snaps.
Snapchat buries photos deep inside a company device in a folder titled “RECEIVED_IMAGES_SNAPS” with a “.NOMEDIA” extension that makes them difficult, but not impossible, to find, as reported by Business Insider. Snapchat does indeed delete photos from their servers after they have been viewed by the recipient, but photos can be deleted from a server without being deleted from a device.
(As a relevant aside, this is the reason most tech experts were skeptical of the Internal Revenue Service’s claim that a server crash made Lois Lerner’s emails irrecoverable. Server hardware and disks are exchangeable. That means if you have two servers with the same type of hardware, you can put the disks from a fried server into the other and all the information should boot up on the second server.)
Snapchat was recently valued at $10 billion and boasts over 100 million monthly users, roughly two-thirds of whom use the social app daily, according to The Wall Street Journal. As of May, users viewed over 1 billion snaps and shared more than 700 million snaps per day.
As a result of the final settlement with the FTC, the company is barred “from misrepresenting the extent to which it maintains the privacy, security, or confidentiality of users’ information,” though it won’t face any direct fines or financial penalty. That is good news for Snapchat, which recently began experimenting with advertising and how to create revenue for the massively growing business.
For a public that is becoming increasingly aware of the internet’s long memory and vulnerability, Snapchat promised what few other social apps were interested in: temporariness. People love the spontaneity of messages with only a few seconds of life. But now Snapchat’s description of itself will have to be a little less carefree, and anyone interested in preserving their reputation online will have to be a little more careful.
