
Does Snapchat's CEO Need to Go? - goronbjorn
http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2014/01/03/snapchat-ceo-go/
======
001sky
Where does media punditry get off on making absolutist calls for heads to
"roll"? I mean, imaging if random non-experts had a journalist fired for every
failed-prediction or embarrasingly wrong policy analysis penned in an op-ed?
There would be no journalists left !

~~~
kyro
Journalists for the most part are attention-whoring nobodies with no expertise
in any particular subject, who hide behind overly aggressive and opinionated
words. Watch pundits on any news channel, or read any massively circulated
news source and it's pretty clear to confirm what I'm saying. They jiggle
their jowls with such empty emotion and intensity.

May be harsh, but I think it's pretty accurate.

~~~
hbags
Punditry is not journalism. Journalism is not punditry.

That said, I find it morally repugnant that 001sky seems to want to quash the
right of either to engage in public speech, simply because said speech calls
some entrepreneur's credentials into question. It's fine for any person (be
they a research-oriented journalist or a bloviating pundit) to raise these
sorts of questions, even if I think their position is weak and a tad
ridiculous.

If you, as an entrepreneur, are too weak to handle public scrutiny (including
scrutiny from people who are quite unlike yourself), then you should find
another line of work.

~~~
kyro
Punditry != journalism, you're right. But I think what I said applies to most
in both categories.

------
jimsilverman
i'm shocked by the comments here.

it was a massive and anticipated security flaw. the CEO's reaction was not to
fix it, not to apologize, but to arrogantly lie about the severity of the
threat.

less than a week after the CEO deemed the attack theoretical, it happened. the
CEO's reaction was not to fix it, not to apologize, but to offer an opt-out
after the damage had been done.

not sure why snapchat is getting a free pass on this, but it's horrifying.

~~~
code_duck
What I can figure out is why more hasn't been made of how the snapchat app
doesn't delete viewed photos at all: it stores them in the phone permanently.

[http://m.ksl.com/index/story/sid/25106057?mobile_direct=y](http://m.ksl.com/index/story/sid/25106057?mobile_direct=y)

[http://www.theguardian.com/media-network/partner-zone-
infose...](http://www.theguardian.com/media-network/partner-zone-
infosecurity/snapchat-photos-not-deleted-hidden)

Seems to me like a massive breach of trust which defies the entire claim of
the app.

~~~
rickhanlonii
I was confused by this for awhile until I started hanging around a group of
people who use SnapChat almost as much as texting. For the most part they
share innocuous "here's what I'm doing" type photos. They use SnapChat because
it's a really easy to send a photo to everyone on their list at the same time
individually when they want to share a photo of what they're doing at that
moment, with no feed or wall or comments to maintain later.

Thus, they really don't care if the photos are saved anywhere because they're
not concerned with the privacy of their photos--at worst the snaps they share
are unflattering. Their main concern is that they don't want to maintain any
photos later, they just want to tell each other 'hi, here's what I'm doing'
and forget about it.

In other words, to them SnapChat isn't a platform to share photos _secretly_ ,
it's a platform to share photos _momentarily_. SnapChat even sells it as this:

>The images might be a little grainy, and you may not look your best, but
that's the point. It's about the moment, a connection between friends in the
present, and not just a pretty picture.

I get it now. I still don't like SnapChat at all (the UI is ugly, the UX is
par, and I don't like the attitude of the company), but I see the user appeal
and I see why the users SnapChat wants most will continue to use the app even
though one of their friends may be keeping that picture they took of their
thanksgiving turkey permanently.

~~~
code_duck
How would that be an improvement over text messaging?

------
jusben1369
So the more interesting article here is "Do people even care any more?" Is
Snapchat's CEO making an educated guess that his users are on the cutting edge
of SN users and are already sharing a boat load of information and just don't
care that much about the breach? Whenever FB makes any privacy changes there's
usually a huge uproar. But not many of those complaining are high schoolers or
college kids. Maybe they know their user base better than we think.

~~~
bertil
It makes sense: I have seen many security professionals complain on the
principle, but not one user publicly state they are going to abandon SnapChat
for that. These are roughly the generation that threatened to leave when
Facebook rearranged buttons.

I'm not sure I got the extend of the issue, but: there is now an accessible
database of phone numbers to SnapChat handles, right? I get how large scale
hackers might use it (but presumably already have); or how a large marketing
operation could use that to associate phones numbers that they have with
handles, that are presumably unusable for the moment, unless SnapChat users
would accept an friend invitation from a branded account.

However, the kind of spying that worries most SnapChat users should be from
close relatives (parents, teachers, exes, cf. danah boyd’s research), people
who already have your phone number, and already have seen your handle appear
when they installed SnapChat, and were already denied access. That breach
doesn’t change that. The social discovery feature functioning as it is was the
issue, and that was already widely accepted.

------
aryastark
You would assume CNNMoney would be more concerned with the CEO's lack of a
business plan rather than his lack of apology. Let's get our priorities
straight here. I mean, if you're not making money, do you really have a
business? Does any of this even matter? If a tree falls in the forest...

It takes a certain type of person to use Snapchat. A person that believes in
unicorns. That is, someone that believes you can erase things you send over
the internet. I suppose if you believe in that absurdity, then you may also
believe in whatever nonsense the CEO might tell you about their enhanced
security that will prevent this type of breach from ever occurring again.

Or you could just stop using the damn thing. Vote with your wallet, er,
eyeballs.

------
aubreyjohnson
Sorry is an emotion and this is a business. I don't care about how Snapchat
"feels," I care about what they've done to fix the security issues and how
successful that effort is.

~~~
mathattack
If someone doesn't accept the blame, perhaps they're less likely to make sure
the problem doesn't repeat.

------
thenmar
It's a little strange how much vitriol that article contains. It's as if the
author is just itching for someone to finally put one of those 20-something
entrepreneurs who didn't have to climb the corporate ladder for decades in his
place.

------
baldajan
Asking for a person's head every time a mistake is made isn't something a
mature person would do. Maybe Dan Primack (the writer) should be fired and
replaced by an "adult" that won't make those claims... Now doesn't that sound
ridiculous?

------
iLoch
Take a deal and jump ship boys, your idea won't be worth anything in 6 months
when the next big thing comes out.

~~~
uladzislau
Probably it's too late already.

------
NN88
its funny how when things go wrong in private companies, how quickly the
general public thinks they can weigh in on how someone needs to stay with that
entity.

Imagine building something and losing your influence over it to the rest of
the world.

~~~
toomuchtodo
> Imagine building something and losing your influence over it to the rest of
> the world.

Happens a lot more often than you'd think.

------
octatone2
They simply need to own up to a poor implementation of a useful feature and
take protecting user data more seriously.

~~~
onedev
Hah, good one...

When is the last time a company owned up to their mistakes and fixed them like
that?

------
johnrob
What's the big deal? In the age of surveillance, all data is public.

~~~
iluvuspartacus
Tell that to the wife (possibly husband) hiding from her (his) deranged
spouse.

Data breaches can have very serious consequences for individuals.

~~~
electic
If you have this issue in your life, using any service is a bad idea. This
includes Facebook, Pinterest, anything. When you interact with services you
create data and in many ways data exhaust that can be used to locate you or
reveal things about your interests, traits, etc.

------
adamsrog
Why is the author so focused on an apology? Does a forced apology really solve
anything?

If I were a Snapchat user, I'd primarily be interested in what they're doing
to prevent anything of the sort from happening in the future.

------
mbloom1915
apology? these are two kids from Stanford who made a fun project and it just
so happen to take off. Give them a break, their team of less than 5 people
could careless what the public thinks!

~~~
minimaxir
Snapchat isn't a "project" anymore. It's a business.

~~~
icedog
It's a business that doesn't have any business.

~~~
3am
Did you read the WSJ Andreesen interview that's on the frontpage
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7007332](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7007332))?

He gave a plausible and coherent explanation of Snapchat's strategy (spoiler:
Tencent of the West). I think that Tencent's valuation is stretched and I
think Snapchat is unlikely to succeed even if that is actually their goal...
but it was interesting, anyway.

edit: hey, w1ntermute, thank you for that interesting response. Cognitively I
think my brain wants a tidy explanation for them turning down the $3B,
otherwise I can't make any sense of it whatsoever.

~~~
w1ntermute
> He gave a plausible and coherent explanation of Snapchat's strategy

No, he doesn't. All he did was demonstrate his utter lack of understanding of
East Asia.

East Asian cultures are high-context, meaning that when Tencent released non-
messenger services (that could actually turn a profit), users were much more
likely to use them because they were already familiar with the company and its
existing messaging service. But this strategy does not work well in the low-
context cultures of the West, where people are more comfortable with giving
new companies and products a chance. Snapchat cannot expand into other
verticals with the ease that Tencent did.

~~~
robterrell
That's what people said about Asia-style free-to-play games, too: that they
would never work in the West due to cultural differences. Turns out that was
totally wrong.

~~~
w1ntermute
No, you're actually making the mistake of conflating China with the rest of
Asia. Japan, which also has a high-context culture, has paid upfront for games
for decades. And it wasn't just that free-to-play games were popular in China
first, it's that paid games could never turn a profit because people would
pirate them. There's a huge difference between people not using a product and
people using it without paying for it.

The primary reason why free-to-play games became popular in the West is
because the $0.99 floor that Apple set for the App Store drove consumer
psychology regarding app purchases, which made it difficult to turn a profit
in any other way. Just take a look at Steam to see how much money is being
made from non-freemium games.

------
dreamfactory
Seems the journalist and a lot of commenters here are saying that a service
like this needs to be regulated so that there are consequences for negligence
or carelessness. There's probably something in that, but in the absence of a
regulatory framework for social media systems, snapchat surely has no
liability or requirement around data security (beyond existing regulations).

------
metaphorm
anybody remember tamagotchi? beanie babies? pogs?

snapchat is the pogs of 2013. its already 2014. clock is ticking.

------
kyberias
Does Fortune's Dan Primack need to go?

