Your High School Wants You To Install Snapchat

Bennett Haselton writes: They would never admit it, but your high school admins would probably breathe a sigh of relief if all of their sexting-mad students would go ahead and install Snapchat so that evidence of (sometimes) illegal sexting would disappear into the ether. They can't recommend that you do this, because it would sound like an implicit endorsement, just like they can't recommend designated drivers for teen drinking parties -- but it's a good bet they would be grateful. Read on for the rest.

Five teenagers at Warren Township High School in Gurnee, Illinois were arrested in November in conjunction with a girl's topless photo being distributed throughout the school. Last Thursday, in Rochester Hills, Michigan, a prosecutor announced that contemplating filing child pornography charges against "dozens" of students for distributing explicit pictures to other students at Rochester Adams High School. In Portland, Oregon, police are investigating a group of Grant High School students for making videos of each other having sex at the school and off campus. (And, of course, these are just the incidents that police found out about.) Naturally, schools everywhere have been falling over themselves to institute strict anti-cyber-bullying and anti-sexting policies (not to mention that sending and forwarding sexually explicit pictures of children under 18 is a federal crime as well).

Schools have rules for reasons that are a mixture of cynical protection against lawsuits and sincere concern for the students. When education system teach students not to smoke cigarettes, they're presumably doing that out of genuine concern for students' welfare, since it would be hard to sue the school for not teaching about the dangers of smoking. When a school installs a railing by the side of a walkway to keep students safe from passing cars, they're probably motivated by a mixture of concern over being sued, and legitimate concern for students' safety. When the school installs software on their computers to block Facebook and Reddit (even outside of class time, when computers are sitting idle and students have nothing else to do), they're probably motivated entirely by liability concerns - because they know virtually all of those students can get on those websites at home, so they're not affecting the students' long-term welfare by keeping them off of those websites, but they just don't want to be liable for anything if the students access those sites at school.

In the case of anti-sexting policies, I'm not cynical enough to think that schools are motivated entirely by liability concerns. There are actual risks to sexting pictures of yourself, even if you're never charged with violating child pornography laws: the embarrassment of your picture being forwarded around the school, or ending up in the archive of a porn site. On the other hand, worse things happen to dozens of high school students every month, but only a handful of schools get dragged into the national spotlight as a result of a child porn investigation. So let's call it about 25% due to legitimate concern for students and 75% due to liability reasons and concern for adverse publicity.

But sexting students could vastly reduce schools' concerns about both issues, by sending pictures using an app like Snapchat, which automatically deletes photos after the recipient has viewed them -- in order to greatly reduce the chance of a picture being saved or forwarded after it's sent. Please note, I'm not saying the photos can't be saved anyway, or recovered by computer forensics. And take heed: I'm not saying you should do it either way! But if you greatly reduce the chances of an image being saved, you greatly reduce the chances of it leading to a scandal that engulfs the school, or leads to a federal child pornography charge.

Of course there are cases where teens were arrested for sending child pornography through Snapchat as well. But these high-profile stories don't address the relevant question, which is: Are you less likely to get arrested (or expelled, or humiliated) for sending these pictures if you do it through Snapchat, even if the likelihood doesn't drop to zero? Obviously, yes.

Now even someone with no phone-hacking knowledge can figure out that if they receive an image over Snapchat, they can "save" it by taking a photo of their screen with another phone or camera, and the sender won't know. (You can also take a normal screen shot with the phone, but that will notify the sender that you took a screen shot, unless you download a third-party app or try some other hack which may or may not even work by the time you read this.) However, this assumes that the trust relationship between the sender and the recipient is already broken at the time the message is being sent, if the recipient is saving the message without the knowledge or consent of the sender. Some of these sexts are presumably being sent in the context of a relationship in which some (sweet, naive, misguided) trust still exists, so that if the sender sends the message and the recipient doesn't use some sneaky workaround, the picture will get deleted on schedule. If trust only falls apart later, then the recipient won't have a copy of the image any more if it was sent by Snapchat, but they will if it was sent via text.

Actually, it may be possible for the recipient to recover a snapchat image after their smartphone Snapchat app has supposedly "deleted" it -- a company called Digital Forensics offers Snapchat image recovery as a service, but they charge $300-$500 per incident, and even they haven't figured out how to do it on an iPhone yet.

So, in terms of boolean logic, if you send an explicit photo via Snapchat, it might end up being saved permanently and forwarded if:
(
the recipient is already being dishonest with you (saving pics without your permission) at the time that you send the picture
AND
the recipient is smart enough to figure out how to save Snapchat pictures without notifying you -- not that hard, but eliminates some people
)
OR
(
you later go through a nasty breakup with the recipient and they're determined to humiliate you or get you in trouble with the law
AND
they don't mind the fact that they could also get in trouble with the law, for saving or forwarding the picture
AND
they're willing to spend $300 to recover the image
AND
they don't have an iPhone
)

Whereas if you send a photo via regular text, all it takes to get in trouble is either (a) the recipient going through a nasty breakup with you, that puts them in a vindictive frame of mind, while they still have a copy on their phone, or (b) the recipient's family member snooping through their messages.

Your high school would never tell you so out loud, but between Snapchat and texting, you can guess which they would prefer you to use.

Of course, this advice wouldn't have done much good for the Portland students who made and distributed their own sex videos, since creating the illegal permanent recording was their entire goal. Snapchat can help protect people from mild levels of stupid, but it's a barrier you can overcome if you aim high and truly believe in yourself.

Got something to say about privacy, technology, or other topics of interest? Long-form submissions are welcome.

Comments

Re:i knew it was Bennett

[Monkey-Man2000]

I could tell when there was no discernible link to news in the frontpage 'story', and it had the ominous 'Read on for the rest'.

Hey Bennett! Can you tell us the pricing terms to use /. for your own personal blog? I might want to get in on the action.

Seriously Bennett?

[NeoRete]

As a system administrator in a high school with about 1,000 students, I can say in short: No way and this post totally misses the mark.

First and foremost, anything that is going to distract a student in class and is not educationally related will be blocked in school. Simple as that. Teachers have enough to manage in class or outside of class during normal school hours without having to deal with social media intruding into their work.

In regard to sexting and using Snapchat over traditional communication, I have not seen an observable difference in the frequency of issues pre and post Snapchat sexting. There are plenty of ways to save Snapchats that students know know to do, including such low-tech ways as taking photos of the phone displaying the message. OP doesn't consider that these images are sometimes sent to many individuals initially by the person who took the images. By that point, one of the students would most likely alert a school administrator. I'd say a larger indicator of when this would be a school issue is how many individuals it was sent to initially.

Instead of fixing the law, let's sweep it under

[gurps_npc]

Yes, instead of realizing that we went WAY WAY overboard on sex crime laws - lets hide the evidence. That will solve the problem.

1) Most actual offenses are committed by kids being kids.

2) Most arrested for sex crimes do NOT re-offend (while people arrested for theft, drug related or violent crimes DO re-offend).

3) Most places have huge double standards punishing men more than women, boys more than girls.

4) States do their best to ensure that anyone that committed one sex crime gets screwed over entirely - no job, no place to live, no friends, all under the banner of "protect the children", when in reality they endanger the children by encouraging the offenders to break ridiculous laws instead of getting involved in normal social activity like attending church.

5) The rules are set up to the worst first time offenders - family and close friends - while making everyone else paranoid about strangers.

Re:ITS HIM

[aardvarkjoe]

As I remarked in the comments for his last story, If Slashdot would make Bennett an editor, then those who don't want to read his stuff could filter it out using existing tools. That improves the site for those who don't want to see it, and for those who do by reducing the amount of spam and trolls that flood the comment section for every "article" he writes.

I sent an e-mail to /. to ask them to do so, or comment on why they won't. They didn't bother to respond, which is disappointing, although not unexpected given how hostile the Slashdot staff is towards their users.

So, I made the following user script to remove posts that mention "Bennett Haselton": https://gist.github.com/anonymous/3235db049b18699c082b#file-gistfile1-txt

It works with Chrome and Greasemonkey in Firefox. If anyone wants to improve it or package it up nicely, please do; I don't have any prior experience with Javascript or browser extensions.

Obviously this isn't the best solution, but it's the only one we're likely to get.

Re:First look at what EFF has to say.

[bennetthaselton]

Good points. Addressing separately:

1) On a phone that hasn't been jailbroken or rooted, I believe Snapchat notifies the sender if the recipient takes a screen capture of their message. This doesn't prevent it from happening, but it may at least make people think twice about it. If you're having a fling with a girl, and the girl sends you an explicit Snapchat picture which is intended to disappear after you view it, and the girl gets notified that you took a screen capture of it, she might go "What the fuck?" and you might not get any more nookie from that girl; for some guys, this might not be worth the risk.

More generally, of course you're right -- some pics will get screen captured. But Snapchat doesn't have to work perfectly for this purpose, it just has to work better than what people are doing now (sending texts which stay on your phone forever). What percent of explicit pictures sent by text message get deleted right after they get sent? Probably very few. What percent of similar pictures sent via Snapchat get deleted right after they're sent? Probably most of them. It's just an improvement, not a panacea.

2) It would be better if Snapchat let users set up end-to-end encryption so even Snapchat wouldn't be able to eavesdrop on people, and we wouldn't have to "trust" them. For now, all we can say is that it's better than using text messaging.

Re:This is a new low

[Anonymous Coward]

I love how oblivious he is to "The Snappening" while he ignorantly flaps his gums on a topic he is obviously totally uninformed on.

My local high school is primarily afraid of being accused of molesting/fucking/sexually harassing their students.

Like finely tuned instruments executing the "ostrich mentality" they are perfectly content to stay as far away from students genitals &/or pictures as possible and will only intervene once the legal standard of "reasonable person" forces their hand. Once they no longer have the plausible deniability of blissful ignorance, they have ZERO wiggle room in the law on reporting the issue to local police.

Anyone who acts differently is probably a closeted pedophile subconsciously hoping for an opportunity to see some of the illegal material while executing their twisted interpretation of "responsibility" so they can to increase their probability of encountering it while hiding behind the pretext of "due diligence".

Context: (Warning: I am not a lawyer)
My understanding of these issues is this:
In the USA, anyone who views pornography of a minor is mandated to report it to authorities by law. There is no "didn't know they were a minor" defense. The only defense for having viewed it is "I reported it to the authorities". If you don't report it: you have been in possession of it and are guilty until a lengthy reputation-destroying test-case battle to the supreme court.

Technically: the only "legally advisable"(see warning above) solution to this problem is to automatically report EVERY PHOTO/VIDEO ON THE INTERNET to the authorities as potentially being steganographically obfuscated child porn. That's the system of incentives created by the law as it is written. People don't do this because they don't want to DDoS the limited resources the Justice Department allocates to this issue, and the unwritten social contract with the cops is: they won't throw away the key on morally innocent people so that the delicate balance between unconstitutional-in-spirit/necessary-evil prosecutorial discretion and resource constraints can be maintained.

Unlike the War on Drugs where they can deputize sheriffs and recruit ex-military enlisted to play cops and robbers with drug dealers: sex offenders are not profitable cases for the prison industrial complex to seek out and investigate. Aside from "entrapment" issues, it's very expensive to investigate because there isn't a computer vision algorithm to spot pornography, let alone accurately identify age. As a consequence: they have to use fallible and corruptible humans to identify if an image is or isn't child porn.

From a human resources perspective: this is an absolute fucking disaster. Human failure rate alone is obnoxiously high because the legal distinction between 17 and 364 days and 18 and 1 day is concrete and razor thin, but the ability of humans to estimate age by appearance has a accuracy measured in 6-18 months(absolute BEST case). Assuming that computers are still worse at this game than humans: this translates to a minimal level of pre-filtering that computers can do before humans have to be involved in the process. Machine learning can be trained to recognize a cock in a picture, and probably an infant. But training the difference between a 15 year old and a 19 year old? Determining if they are engaged in "lascivious exhibition of the genitals or pubic area of any person"? That's a value judgement that would confound a jury challenged to read the mind of intent! "I know it when I see it" in more clinical language.

Let's look at one of many laws for a second:

18 U.S. Code 2256
(A) Except as provided in subparagraph (B), “sexually explicit conduct” means actual or simulated—
(i) sexual intercourse, including genital-genital, oral-genital, anal-genital, or oral-anal, whether between persons of the same or opposite sex;
(ii) bestiality;
(iii) masturbation;
(iv) sadistic or masochistic abuse; or
(v) lascivious exhibition of th