By Enu Mkparu
In September of 2011, the mobile app called Snapchat took the multimedia world by storm. Its appeal? Send ANY picture to a recipient of your choice, and the picture disappears after 10 seconds. The app, which has been called “the hottest app in America”, almost instantly picked up steam especially amongst the teenage population. Needless to say, the opportunity to send those pictures you wouldn’t want everyone seeing without leaving a trace was far too big a temptation to resist.
During the past few weeks, we’ve all heard about the incident popularly referred to as “The Fappening”, in which compromising pictures of female celebrities were leaked. You probably thought to yourself, “Whew! Thank goodness I’m not a celebrity. Bullet dodged”. Think again.
This week, an incident not dissimilar from that one occurred and is now being dubbed “The Snappening”. Yep you guessed it! As if you didn’t have enough to worry about, like the perfect outfit to wear on that first date or what flavor of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream to indulge in, you now have to worry about what picture of yours could be circulating the World Wide Web. The major difference between both incidents is that while “The Fappening” appears to be aimed towards females, “The Snappening” has no such restrictions. It appears everyone is fair game, irrespective of sex or gender.
The exact number of photos leaked has proven difficult to determine, but the most recent numbers show an estimate of about 200,000 pictures. If it’s any consolation, the big guys at Snapchat have put out a statement insisting that there was no breach on their end. A spokesperson for Snapchat said:
“We can confirm that Snapchat’s servers were never breached and were not the source of these leaks. Snapchatters were victimized by their use of third-party apps to send and receive Snaps, a practice that we expressly prohibit in our Terms of Use precisely because they compromise our users’ security.”
So who exactly is this third party?
In comes Snapsaved.com. About a year ago, 3 men (identity undisclosed) decided they wanted to prove the theory of disappearing photos to be wrong so, they decided to create Snapsaved, “just for the fun of it”. How does it work? Think of Snapsaved as a sort of cloud. When a Snapchat account is connected to it, it saves the users pictures and videos to an online storage locker. Now, all of this would have been fine except, the creators of Snapsaved confirmed last week that their system was breached and photos were leaked. If you aren’t one of the 260,000 users or Snapsaved, you would think you have nothing to worry about. Unfortunately, that is not quite accurate. If one of your Snapchat friends happened to be a Snapsaved user, images you send to them would also be saved.
A group of people from the message board 4chan claimed to have obtained a huge collection of images, which could potentially include child pornography, from the Snapsaved website. One of the men interviewed, assumed to be one the creators of Snapsaved, apologized saying they were very sorry and that things had gotten way out of control. He added that they hadn’t profited from it and didn’t do it to be famous.
Snapsaved has since been taken offline though the men said it still remains a mystery as to how the link to these photos ended up online. As stated earlier, it’s difficult to pin down the exact number of leaked photos. The creators of Snapsaved have said that although the posters on 4chan claim they stole about 200,000 images, the actual number is closer to 40,000. They argue that the posters inflated the images by including photos from pornographic websites. Despite this breach, the creators of Snapsaved expressed their convictions that only photos and videos were leaked and no personal information such as names or numbers.
This occurrence is not the first time Snapchat has faced some criticism. When Snapchat first arrived on the scene, the question of whether the pictures actually disappeared and where they went was a big one everyone was asking. It made people somewhat skeptical of the app. Adam Caudill, an independent security researcher stated, “The issue with them is that their users expect more privacy than they can provide, and the nature of the service has made it more of a target than most.”
Like most technology, anything that’s created can be undone. While Snapchat makes it difficult for third parties, it is still not fool proof. With enough motivation it can be reverse engineered. The most important thing to do, is to protect yourself as a precaution. As much as possible, before sending a picture that could be unfit for public viewing, you might want to consider making yourself as unrecognizable as possible. It’s not entirely possible to avoid the internet, but one can certainly find ways around it.