
Snapchat, You've Made a Huge Mistake - etanz
http://blog.etanzapinsky.com/2013/06/06/snapchat-youve-made-a-huge-mistake/
======
carbocation
Most of the comments are focused on the author's trivial mistake (when was
this information surfaced: now, or at launch?). His substantive point is more
valuable to bring to light.

Perhaps the fact that there are top-users lists highlights the tension between
what Snapchat says that people use it for (sharing brief moments with friends)
vs what people actually use it for.

In fact, I actually use Snapchat for sharing photos with friends, and I still
would prefer that this network information disappear. The existence of a top
list suggests that there is quite a bit of metadata retained long after the
photos are (ostensibly) destroyed.

It implies that the company is building a database that could be used to
reconstruct an enormous network diagram.

~~~
jmduke
> _It implies that the company is building a database that could be used to
> reconstruct an enormous network diagram._

It's actually fun and trivial to do this yourself with a spider: go to
<http://www.snapchat.com/username>, mark 'best friendships' as followthroughs.
A fun thing you notice pretty quickly is that the 'best friend' designation
isn't one-to-one, prolific snappers will appear often in peoples' friends
lists.

I think a SnapChat API is likely on the way, and once they figure out a way to
market this stuff to advertisers (hey, ten seconds of undivided attention
towards an ad is probably worth more than thirty seconds of ignoring a
commercial) they're going to have a whole new host of problems.

~~~
bennyg
That's the day I stop using it. If I get a few second ad every 4 or 5 snaps
then I won't continue my usage of the app. I understand that good things that
require monetary value to continue operating at scale need to have a way to
make money, but advertising should be a last-resort option. We haven't even
seen for-pay snaps yet (more seconds, more options like random clip-art to add
in, etc). Advertising kills the product 9 times out of 10.

~~~
dave5104
I'm on the opposite end there. I would never pay money for extra snap options.
I'd much rather see ads if choosing between the two.

~~~
bennyg
Those two aren't all the options though.

1.) Pay for SnapPro 2.) Sit through advertisements 3.) Let people who want to
pay for SnapPro pay, while you don't because you don't want to pay for it.
Therefore no ads, and Snapchat is making money.

Option 3 is the best for consumers. Option 3 is possible if the price-point
dictates that enough people will pay for it to remain alive and well. Not
everyone will pay. But when is that not always the case?

~~~
moheeb
You've been brainwashed. The best option for consumers is for it to be free,
with no ads.

~~~
jerf
No, it's not. That ends with no service existing at all. Money has to come
from somewhere for the service.

~~~
ansible
Does this really need to be a centralized service though?

Isn't this the sort of thing that could be implemented as a peer-to-peer
networking service?

~~~
jerf
That doesn't get away from the issue of payment, it just moves it around. I
think it does so in a way with a lot of positives, but there's the whole P2P
bootstrapping problem in the way, both in terms of creating the code that even
works and then actually bringing the network online, and unfortunately it
seems that's a pretty big negative in practice.

~~~
Karunamon
It just "moves it around" to the point where the cost is so spread out as to
be effectively zero. What's the average cost of a volunteer-run peer to peer
file sharing network?

~~~
jerf
How many computers running P2P software does it take to write the software?

You can only talk about the "all but 0" marginal cost when you can produce a
piece of software that _really does_ have an all-but-0 marginal cost. And,
therefore, doesn't require the computer running it to be always on, or run on
a dedicated VM, etc. Sure, such a thing may be possible, but you have to
produce it first.

Unfortunately.

------
speeder
Today lots of posts on privacy...

To those saying that if you have nothing to hide you should not have a problem
with this, you are missing some points, and situations...

For example, sometimes you do things that are controversial, but not
necessarily wrong, or "sketchy", and you don't want the negative attention.

For example, regarding the Verizon call list: What if people discover you have
made lots of calls to KKK? They will quickly jump to conclusion that you are
probably a neo-nazi, but maybe you was like that black guy that made a KKK
documentary (I forgot the name, I saw in school many years ago, a teacher
showed us) and interacted a lot with them.

Or snapchat, what if you are exchanging photos with people with some other
people dislike? You never had friends that hate each other? Or your mom that
hate your girlfriend? Or your wife that hate your uncle?

There are lots of situations where privacy is important, and beyond commiting
crimes or being a anti-government rebel...

~~~
rhizome
_What if people discover you have made lots of calls to KKK? They will quickly
jump to conclusion that you are probably a neo-nazi, but maybe you was like
that black guy that made a KKK documentary_

The thing is, Verizon isn't handing over identities. This isn't to absolve
Verizon here at all, but to illustrate that the US Government _can't find
terrorists_ this way.

~~~
mikegioia
Interesting argument, but don't you think the NSA/FBI are just just going to
say "we're not collecting/analyzing enough data"?

~~~
rhizome
Sure, but politicians are saying that it's necessary to find terrorists, but
this warrant doesn't help that happen. Unless, of course, they correlate it
with other data they have, which was perhaps collected warrantlessly and
therefore possibly inadmissable in court. After all, Bush engaged in illegal
wiretapping for 5 years before the 7 years since Section 215 took effect. I
doubt they've thrown that data away.

------
mrlase
You've been able to see this online now for... a long time. Just go to
[http://www.snapchat.com/<username>](http://www.snapchat.com/<username>); and
you can see it.

~~~
cmelbye
I'm glad someone pointed this out. This feature has always existed. You didn't
even have to do it through your web browser, Snapchat has always had a link
within the app to view the profiles of your friends (including their "best
friends").

~~~
stopcodon
Exactly, I'm not sure why this suddenly became news. Did nobody bother to tap
a name in their friends list in the last 6 months?

------
jmathai
This has been circulating in my mind for some time now. It seems to me that
Silicon Valley is so obsessed with "home run" start ups that we've lost track
of caring if they make our lives better.

I'm not necessarily making a moral judgement on Snapchat but I do think it is
something to consider. You can see the same mentality around Chatroulette. I
realize the value of something is not concrete at first; Twitter comes to
mind. I think we all agree that Twitter plays an important role in society
today, yet that was unclear a few years ago.

As a society, are we rallying behind an app that helps people engage in
extramarital affairs as this post suggests? Without getting into morality,
don't we agree that affairs impact not just the two participants but the
families surrounding them?

Are we simply justifying our obsession with "success" by attributing some
theoretical benefit when the drawbacks seem obvious?

~~~
jmduke
_As a society, are we really rallying behind an app that helps people engage
in extramarital affairs as this post suggests? Without getting into morality
don't we agree that affairs impact not just the two participants but the
families surrounding them?_

I use SnapChat daily and its starting to cannibalize a lot of my other methods
of communication: its fast, more personal, more affective, and a lot more fun
to use. I only have ~forty SnapChat friends compared to the ~1200 on Facebook
or ~300 phone numbers I have, and it makes it a lot more intimate: you're not
gonna send a goofy face of yourself to that study partner from freshman
Biology who you never talk to.

(Honestly, it reminds me of what Path could be if Path wasn't so pretentious.)

Oh, and email helps people commit extramarital affairs, too.

~~~
jmathai
I'm sure there are useful scenarios like yours. But that alone doesn't
magically make the app have a net positive impact. I'm not claiming it is
positive or negative but rather something to consider.

The comment about email isn't really logical. Crow bars help you kill people
but that doesn't mean we should treat them the same way as guns. I'm sure
there is a technical term for it (logical fallacy) but that's besides my point
and I'm on mobile :).

~~~
jmduke
_The comment about email isn't really logical. Crow bars help you kill people
but that doesn't mean we should treat them the same way as guns. I'm sure
there is a technical term for it (logical fallacy) but that's besides my point
and I'm on mobile :)._

This is exactly my point.

~~~
jmathai
>> This is exactly my point.

Not sure I follow. Are you saying that "crow bars kill people too, so we
shouldn't have legislation for guns that don't also apply to crow bars?"

If so, we probably disagree fundamentally on debates - which is fine but an
important point.

~~~
jmduke
My point is that SnapChat is a crowbar, not a gun. A lot of talk about
SnapChat revolves around affairs and sexting because that gets more page
views, but there's really no proof that people are using it primarily for
amoral reasons. The totality of people I know use it just for goofy temporal
messages (and, yeah, occasional sexts to their S.O., but nothing they wouldn't
otherwise do via SMS)

------
ryandvm
I find Snapchat's charter fascinating. I say this as the author of a
competing, and much less successful, product called Privy
([https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.appidio.pr...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.appidio.privy)).

I wrote Privy with a very simple use case in mind. It was for sending messages
that you _never_ want to resurface. Privacy, of course, was paramount.

After reading a few interviews with the Snapchat guys, I was amused that they
always pitched it to be about temporal communications. They would downplay
Snapchat as a secretive transport and talk about how it's more about sharing
special moments. These new "un-private" features very clearly show that
Snapchat is sincere about this use case.

It simply never occurred to me that people might want to send temporal
messages and that privacy around sending those messages not be absolutely
critical. I don't know if I'm out of touch or what. Or maybe this is more of a
natural selection thing for successful mobile messaging products. Obviously
the network effect of a privacy-oriented app is by definition nonexistent.
Trust me.

~~~
ionwake
I do not know much about privy, but as a competitor - why do you feel snapchat
was more successful?

~~~
ryandvm
I think they were more successful because of marketing. Initially, Privy and
Snapchat were fairly close to feature parity. I had never actually heard of
them while I was developing Privy. And then about a month or so before I was
ready to release Privy, SnapChat hit the TechCrunch lottery. After that they
quickly became a media sensation.

Being a side project, Privy wasn't able to compete. Especially after they
started picking up funding. Once the Snapchat buzz hit full fever pitch I
threw in the towel on development.

I used to think that useful apps could sell themselves. I know a lot of
developers have this mentality. Nothing could be further from the truth. I now
have much greater respect for the value of good marketing.

~~~
lotso
This is an incorrect history of Snapchat. Snapchat was a couple of college
kids' summer project. It had a couple of thousand of users in the Fall of
2011, but didn't take off until it went viral in a couple of LA high schools.

They raised money in the Spring of 2012, and were still relatively under the
radar of most tech publications. It wasn't until the Fall of 2012 that they
started getting major buzz.

I'm not disagreeing that marketing can't sway products into success, but that
was not the case with Snapchat.

------
leephillips
"Facebook makes it extremely clear that they never give away this information"

Not a quick learner, I'm afraid.

~~~
GotAnyMegadeth
I remember at one point there was a FB app that told you who spent the most
time looking at your profile, then generated a photo and tagged people in it.
Hilariously I was the top person on my GF's sister's one, not sure why. Not
sure where they got the data for that...

~~~
coreyja
Pretty positive all the apps like this were either just random data or fake. I
could be wrong, but I believe that none of these apps ever actually worked

------
lawdawg
Isn't this pretty much exactly what Google got in trouble for with the Buzz
launch?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Buzz#Legal_issues>

------
midas
If you login to Facebook, go to the search bar and type in the letter A, you
will see a list of your friends whose name (first/middle/last) starts with an
A, but it's sorted based on who you are most likely to be looking for. I don't
know exactly how they determime this since it could be based on so many
factors like messaging, profile viewing, searching, photo tagging, shared
events... even pokes!

It's spooky accurate and yet Facebook goes out of their way to never mention
this kind of thing: they don't want us to realize how well they know us!

------
greenyoda
This is a perfect example of what has been said about the recent revelation
that the NSA is collecting the metadata for all phone calls (calling number,
called number, etc.): you can learn a lot about a person just by knowing who
they've communicated with and how often, without having to know anything about
the actual content of the communication. If your girlfriend sees that someone
with a female name she's never heard of is your number one Snapchat contact,
that's probably all she needs to know.

~~~
reddit_clone
Hey, that's my Nana who likes to keep tabs on me!

------
lnanek2
Back when huge companies were being made thanks to viral games on Facebook,
the CEO of Arkadium came and gave a talk at the NY Gaming Meetup.

He said, do some potential users get annoyed with all the gifting and invites
and requests for help? Sure! But those are not the users that are going to get
your viral coefficient over 1 (each user brings in more than one other user)
and trigger geometric growth. So even if you miss out on some users because
you write a game that is very social, you are still doing the right thing,
because the social users are the one who make you a hit.

Same thing here. Are a few privacy minded individuals like the author going to
abandon the service? Sure. Are they worth as much to the company as users that
will revel in social graphs and drag friends in? No way. Is it a mistake to
add social graphing in this case? No it isn't.

------
VuongN
If you want to check out an alternative, our nCryptedCloud iOS has a secure
camera that would encrypt the image (in memory) before it even gets to the
device. Once encrypted, you manage access rights. You revoke access to anyone
in the future that even if they have the image, without the privilege, the
file is useless. You could also send a quick share (time-controlled SnapChat
style) with anyone--pdf files too! It's free, check it out:
<https://www.ncryptedcloud.com/install/ios/> (for non-us regions, just add:
?region=non-us to the URL). If you have question, just ask!

~~~
itcmcgrath
All seems very pointless when you can 1) Take a screenshot, or 2) take a photo
of it.

Once you give someone the ability to see or hear something, there is no
_guaranteed_ way to take it back.

I say this because: "You revoke access to anyone in the future that even if
they have the image, without the privilege, the file is useless"

~~~
VuongN
Even the foremost thinker in security, Dan Geer
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Geer>), once said: "...The most serious
attackers will probably get in no matter what you do. At this point, the
design principal, if you’re a security person working inside a firm, is not no
failures, but no silent failures."

In the same respect, you can't really stop people from taking screenshots or
take a photo of... a photo. What we do is we put a watermark of the recipient
in the image. This way, if that image get released anywhere, you knew who was
the culprit and you can take further actions.

No box is ever impenetrable, then the next best thing is to know when, what,
why, whom of the penetration. I hope that helps. It is a difficult problem to
solve, however, we have to do something!

Thank you for your thoughts.

-V.

~~~
thiloberlin
A watermark won't help me with at an anonymous service like snapchat.

------
bluetidepro
As many have already pointed out in other comments, it definitely was already
a feature. I would just add that I think the author still has a valid point,
though, because this new update does bring a lot more light on that feature. I
would say before this update, it was a pretty "hidden"/unknown feature. I
wonder if more users will speak up about it in their reviews now that it's
much more obvious to access that information.

------
lehrblogger
I disagree with etanz's post, and think it makes sense for Snapchat to make
this feature more accessible (as others have pointed out, profiles have
existed on the web for a long time).

In particular, the people we communicate with is _not_ "one of our tightest
guarded secrets," especially among the teenage demographic. The term 'bff',
for example, has meaning because teenagers like to declare their relationships
publicly. Of course our friendships define who we are, and we use those
friendships to express our identity in the same way we use fashion to express
our identity.

I doubt a large part of Snapchat's usage is for extramarital affairs and the
like, and the company is probably happy to make the app _less_ useful for
that, and more useful for communication between friends. By making the top
friends visible, if user A looks at user B's profile and sees herself as third
in the list, and is jealous of the people in the first two spots, then the
best thing for user A to do about it is... send more snaps.

------
_pmf_
This reminds me of this article[1] that nicely outlines that the social
network graph is either useless (see Facebook; what good is the fact that I
have added 10000 users as "friend"?) or creepy (now Snapchat, apparently).

[1] <http://blog.pinboard.in/2011/11/the_social_graph_is_neither/>

------
niix
Stop being sketchy and it won't be a big deal.

~~~
roc
Eric Schmidt, is that you?

------
cwb71
Interesting that this would bubble to the top today in light of the Verizon
FISA story.

The White House and others defending the practice keep repeating “it’s just
metadata.”

Knowing exactly who you talk to, when, where, and for how long can expose a
lot about you and be pretty incriminating!

------
ParkerK
Snapchat has had the leaderboard / friends page since launch. How is this new?
This has been like this for ages. Maybe I'm misunderstanding what OP is
saying, but I don't understand why this is being addressed this late into the
app's life.

------
frasierman
Correct me if I'm wrong, but hasn't this been there for a while? I know
classmates who have been mortified when they find out that who they Snapchat
with is public.

~~~
josephjrobison
Yea, it's been there for at least 8 months, when I started using it.

------
jwatte
I was quite upset that the author seems to think people have a right to
deceitful behavior and that society should support secrecy. In fact, the
hiding of information and duplicit behavior always aims to benefit the actor
at the expense of everyone else (rather than being win win.) This is the
definition of anti-social!

If everybody had perfect transparency, it'd happily give up my privacy,
because it would benefit society (you, me, us all) tremendously!

------
Mitchella
It appears as though the author is unaware that this feature has been here the
entire time. This 'leaderboard' has always been accessible to anyone and
everyone. In the past it was an out of app mechanism, I would have to go to
the site and go to made up example url: snapchat/user/Mitchella to find the
information but it would still show my 'score' and my 'most snapchatted to
list.

------
seanponeil
This feature has been around since launch I believe

------
dylangs1030
I don't personally mind people seeing information like this about me, but I
can see why it's a bit of an invasion. I just learned who gets the most
snapchats from who on my friends list. I think a lot of people will either
love or hate this.

Love this because they're exempt from the downsides and they have juicy
details on their friends.

Hate this because their own details are now public.

------
mholkesvik
I'm now getting 404 errors for the web profiles:

<http://www.snapchat.com/username>

...but I was building a crawler for fun and have been making tons of requests
- the other pages seem to be working just fine. Anyone else having trouble?
Did Snapchat do the right thing and shut down user profiles?

~~~
micahroberson
It appears they did!

~~~
mholkesvik
Nope - looks like it's back online, at least for me. I think the response is
just timing out, perhaps a heavy traffic issue.

------
bsg75
If you are surprised a "free" service is collecting data, please lookup the
word 'gullible' in the dictionary.

Nothing is free kids.

~~~
leephillips
Don't bother. Contrary to popular belief, "gullible" is not a real word and is
not in the dictionary.

------
joshdance
I agree that Snapchat needs to be more forthright about what kind of
information they store and what actually happens to the photos. But I kind of
feel like if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry. If you do
have something to hide, maybe it would be worth your time to find a different
app.

------
TheMagicHorsey
Can someone explain to me how Snapchat photos are considered ephemeral? Anyone
can capture data at the endpoint and persist it. E.g. I can take a screenshot
of a photo sent to me, and it will be in my iPhoto archive forever. I can
share it from there to my entire contact list.

What am I missing? Please educate me.

~~~
ddt
It tells the sender if you screenshot. It's not enough to prevent it from
happening, but it adds a pretty big social incentive not to do so.

~~~
TheMagicHorsey
How reliable is that? I can't imagine the snapchat app can know if some third
party app grabs an image of the screen and does not notify it that a
screenshot has been taken.

At the most basic level you can use one phone to take a photo of another
phone. If the object is to expose an embarassing photo, that may be enough
resolution to accomplish the end. I really think it is impossible to secure
the data once it is on a client.

------
glenntzke
I'm bothered by the tone and inclusive language of this post. Of course an
inspection of one's private conversations is intrusive and will make them
uncomfortable, but this isn't true for all: "We get incredibly offending[sic]
when someone reads our text messages, but even if they never see the messages
themselves we are still embarrassed the second they see who we are talking
to."

I'm not embarrassed by the people I communicate with - hell that would make my
friends list on facebook a nightmare! And when you see my snapchat best
friends, it's my girlfriend and 1 other guy and 1 other girl - my 2 top
traveling friends. We use snapchat while on the road to share funny, temporal
traveling moments that don't warrant setting up a real shot or publication.
And it's a lot of fun.

I suppose if you need anonymity for your snaps you shouldn't be sharing your
username with those you trust. And you shouldn't be trusted, either.

------
ErikAugust
Never downloaded or used Snapchat... but I know very clearly what some of the
use-cases are.

Clearly the solution is just to create a toggle for that feature in Settings.
Boom... make your "being shady" user persona happy in a matter of minutes.

------
tylerhowarth
This has been part of the product since launch. Not a huge mistake.

------
shuzchen
Someone could write a horde of snapchat bots that'll spam you when you follow
them (and a local client to chatter back), thus pushing your real
"bestfriends" off the top list.

------
yefim
There's even an easy way to explore your own (and others') snapchat graph:
<http://snapgraph.me/>

------
minimaxir
Yes, this was available on the website, but how often do Snapchatters use the
web instead of using the mobile app?

It's a reverse of Instagram's approach.

------
gcb0
Gmail did exactly the same thing. Remember the circles(?) privacy snafu?

------
giologist
I deleted my SnapChat because of this.

------
ap0rnnstar
Is there a way to turn this off?

------
beachstartup
so in other words, it causes drama, which will generate more user activity.

------
hydralist
yeah it has been at launch and it is brutal. does clearing your feed delete
your top friends? they badly need a way to clear or disable top friends,
otherwise using snapchat with the opposite gender is a jealousy-magnet-
clusterfuck with significant others when they see it... speaking from
experience

------
KathyMurphy
If you are looking for snapchat for adults without the Best Friends feature
check out www.ncryptedcloud.com

The private camera function is much better than Snapchat because I can send my
private photos to ANYONE not just someone who has Snapchat.

The ability to watermark the image with the email or the phone number of my
friends is WAY better than a notice that someone took a screen shot IMHO.

~~~
csears
This kind of spammy comment is not appreciated. Based on a quick read of your
site, your product isn't even remotely similar to SnapChat. Why would you
damage your brand by leaving misleading comments like this?

