Have you ever heard of Snapchat? It’s an app developed for iOS and Android. Using Snapchat, you can send pictures back and forth with your friends, the twist is that these pictures self-destruct after being opened. The idea behind it is that people will feel more comfortable sending some pictures (cough sexting cough) if they know the pictures will delete themselves after being seen by the intended recipient. The company ran into some problems this week though, and now they’re looking at answering a lot of questions from the public. Let us here at your social media and SEO firm break it down for you.
An electronic forensics expert decided to do a little digging into Snapchat. He didn’t expect to find much, but it tuns out there was plenty to find. In a matter of hours, he had successfully extracted all of the photos taken with Snapchat on an Android device. It turns out the pictures were never deleted, just hidden.
“I was surprised no one else had done it because of how easy it was,” said the investigator, Richard Hickman. “It just took a couple of days to discover it.”
Currently, Hickman can only pull Snapchat photos from Android phones, but he believes it is possible for iPhones as well. Snapchat hasn’t really responded to this new discovery yet, but they better get out ahead of it if they hope to salvage any part of their credibility. It’s entirely possible that they will be investigated by the Federal Trade Commission for lying about the functionality of their service.
What will this mean for Snapchat as an app? Honestly, I think they’ll fail, and I think they deserve t0 fail. You can’t build an entire service around one specific feature and then have that feature not be true. If the pictures are permanent anyway, why wouldn’t people just use the regular messenger instead?