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Why We Should Celebrate Snapchat and Encourage Ephemeral Communication
An anonymous reader writes "Within a few months of launching, Snapchat has made an enormous and lasting impact on the culture of communication on the Internet – and we should all be grateful. They have simplified a security process enough to the point that anybody can use it, while validating the market of the next generation of privacy-preserving ephemeral communication. Most importantly, we may finally get a break from the forced permanence of the Facebook and Google world, where everything you do and share is a data point to be monetized and re-sold to the highest bidder."
This is slashdot my friend. Editors don't actually edit anything.
As soon as I saw this I laughed my ass off. The reality is that if you send something to someone, they can have it forever. A friend of mine has written apps for both iOS and Android using Cydia Substrate to hook the API calls used to display images and video in snapchat and automatically save them out to your SD card.
It's not possible by definition of how computers work to do something like this securely.
Snapchat is a picture messaging service which displays the image, once opened, for only 10 seconds, then deletes it. You can't screenshot the image because you need to hold your touchscreen for the image to display for those 10 seconds.
There are hacks to bypass this security feature, but they require a rooted phone.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
(Disclosure: I'm am old bastard myself but I work in the mobile dev world so it's my job to know when things are making waves in the industry.)
The demographic that they appeal to is very, very young. As in teens and college-aged adults. The app itself is extremely popular in the iTunes store and on Android. So much so, in fact, that Facebook, after not being able to buy it quickly (after explosive... truly explosive growth) decided to rip it off and build a clone called, wait for it, Poke.
People declared the end of Snapchat as big bad Facebook was going to eat their lunch, digest their user base and excrete them out into a paper bag to be lit aflame and left on Snapchat's front step. Poke hit around #14 on iTunes, then slide down fairly rapidly and is now an afterthought.
This was a victory for small dev shops that demonstrated that big companies can clone a product but that user loyalty is a very, very real thing.
The enemy of my enemy is quite possibly also my enemy. I've made a lot of enemies.