
Snapchat’s new ‘scary’ privacy policy - Shivetya
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/snapchats-new-scary-privacy-policy-has-left-users-outraged-2015-10-29
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simonw
“You grant Snapchat a world-wide, perpetual, royalty-free, sublicensable, and
transferable license to host, store, use, display, reproduce, modify, adapt,
edit, publish, create derivative works from, publicly perform, broadcast,
distribute, syndicate, promote, exhibit, and publicly display that content in
any form and in any and all media or distribution methods”

This exact language shows up in almost every ToS, and every six months or so a
dumb news story blows up because someone who isn't a lawyer reads it and gets
angry.

I'm not a lawyer either, but I'm going to try to translate it anyway:

"You grant Snapchat a world-wide, perpetual, royalty-free, sublicensable, and
transferable license" \- you agree that when you upload something to Snapchat
you can't turn round later and claim they owe you money for doing so.

"to host, store, use, display, reproduce" = to store the data that you upload
and show it back to you (or to other people, presumably based on the semantics
of how sharing works within the application)

"modify, adapt, edit, publish, create derivative works from" = create
thumbnails. Provide you with an editing interface. Update records in a
database relating to the content you uploaded. Build features akin to
retweeting on Twitter or resharing or tools that let you add mustaches to your
photos or whatever.

"publicly perform, broadcast, distribute, syndicate, promote, exhibit and
publicly display that content" = show your content to other people (again,
based on the semantics of how those features work in the app).

"in any form and in any and all media or distribution methods" = again,
thumbnails, format conversions etc. If someone invents a new media or
distribution method, Snapchat should be allowed to build it into their
applications without getting you to re-approve the ToS.

I think the fundamental problem here is that ToS need to be written to be as
generic as possible. If Snapchat wrote a ToS that legally bound them to the
exact way that their app works today, they would have to get a lawyer involved
with literally every feature change they make (or feature experiment they run)
in the future.

~~~
celticninja
Great, so they have the best of intentions but what happens when they go broke
and their data is sold off, the new owners have no obligation to the old users
they just own all the pictures and could do whatever they want with it.

Additionally who is to say that they don't decide down the line that using
user pics for profit is fine and something they want to do. How often do we
saw laws enacted for what appears to be good reason and then used for other
purposes. Why do we think a for profit company would be better at this sort of
thing than a government?

~~~
thrownaway2424
The very next sentence which the article doesn't bother mentioning limits the
scope of Snapchat's rights under this worldwide perpetual blah blah grant.

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turs0und
Quoted from article:

“You grant Snapchat a world-wide, perpetual, royalty-free, sublicensable, and
transferable license to host, store, use, display, reproduce, modify, adapt,
edit, publish, create derivative works from, publicly perform, broadcast,
distribute, syndicate, promote, exhibit, and publicly display that content in
any form and in any and all media or distribution methods,” the Terms of
Service state.

This is what it takes for the company to start monetizing seriously. I
certainly expected it. Facebook did this like 20 times.

~~~
loceng
Maybe they're lining up their TOS to be acquired by FB.

~~~
mkolodny
I think they're past that point. Lining up their TOS to go public.

~~~
JonFish85
How are they past that point? I doubt if they're all that close to an IPO in
the sense that they haven't really proved any sort of monetization that can
come even close to justifying even a billion dollar valuation. If they got an
offer from FB I have to think they think long and hard about taking it.

------
zo7
From Snapchat's privacy policy,

"Snapchat captures what it’s like to live in the moment. So in many cases the
messages sent through our services are automatically deleted from our servers
once we detect that they have been viewed or have expired. And again in most
cases, the services are programmed to delete a message from the recipient’s
device once it’s been viewed or expired as well.

There are some exceptions though to this rule. Some of our services, such as
My Story, Replay, and Live, allow users to interact with the messages and
content you provide through the services for a longer period of time. That
means those messages and content may be available on our servers and a
recipient’s device after they’ve been viewed or expired. For example, if you
add a Snap to My Story, other users will be able to view it for roughly 24
hours. And because Snaps submitted to Live and other crowd-sourced Stories are
inherently public and chronicle matters of public interest, we may save them
indefinitely and allow them to be viewed again through any of our services or
third-party sources."

It seems like they've put in the new language so they can try to monetize
their Live service, which should be expected (and users already give implicit
permission to the company by sending a snap to them to display publicly).
Otherwise personal message stay personal, as far as their privacy policy is
concerned. I'm no legal expert, but surely they can't (legally) lie to their
users about this, right?

~~~
onewaystreet
It seems like we go through this same story for every social network: company
changes its TOS, people jump to the worst possible conclusion, company
clarifies, people find something new to overreact to.

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zongitsrinzler
There is no privacy when posting something to the internet.

~~~
davnicwil
Why is this downvoted?

By default, this is the only privacy strategy which makes sense anywhere on
the internet, for the average user of large scale services.

Whenever you post anything, anywhere, but particularly on any kind of public
forum or social network, assume it'll be seen by your current and future
coworkers and grandmother. Assume it'll be the post/photo/video used to
identify you on the news if you're ever in the news for anything.

If it's still ok, post away. If it's not, consider why you're sharing it on a
social network anyway, and if it's still important to share with a select
group of people, then consider sharing it by some other means.

~~~
forgetsusername
> _Why is this downvoted?_

I didn't down vote it, but...

Not everyone is technologically savvy. Snapchat became popular because of the
implication that the pictures you take with it are ephemeral and private. It's
sort of the whole point, isn't it? If not, how is it different than a SMS
picture message?

Sure, to those who understand the tech, it's pretty obvious that whatever is
sent through the pipes is out there, in perpetuity. But most people don't
think like that, and Snapchat played on that misconception as a _model_.

~~~
vezzy-fnord
It might be construed as unethical, but it's also a case of adverse selection,
which for what it's worth is instrumental to a large class of business models,
and especially in the digital age. Much of it is software's intrinsic ability
at providing external uniformity even in the case of internally unsound
design, coupled with withholding of source (primary auditable information) as
essential to business.

It's not just Snapchat. Lots of software targeted towards programmers,
sysadmins and power users relies on similar smoke-and-mirrors branding that
tries to hide as much technical details as possible in favor of presenting
grand high-level summaries that present it as a solution to an imminent
problem. Either way, the assumption is you won't screen them.

------
mdasen
I think the crux of it is that people don't expect Snapchats to become public.
They expect them to be more like text messages where there's an expectation of
privacy. When a user posts on Facebook, there's an expectation that the
content is out there for people to see. If you post a public video on YouTube,
you expect people to see it. If you uploaded a video on YouTube, there's an
expectation that the local news might show it. But no one expects the local
news to show an embarrassing Snapchat you sent to your friends.

But even Facebook's TOS is a lot kinder. "This IP License ends when you delete
your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with
others, and they have not deleted it." Most people don't re-share photos. They
comment and tag them, but if you delete the photo, Facebook's license to it
ends. They can't then give that photo to a news paper because they no longer
have a license to it.

Similarly, YouTube's TOS has a similar provision. "The above licenses granted
by you in video Content you submit to the Service terminate within a
commercially reasonable time after you remove or delete your videos from the
Service." If you delete content from YouTube, they're license to the content
terminates within a commercially reasonable time after you delete it.

So, both Facebook and YouTube let you terminate the content license even
though there's a better assumption about the content being public. People have
been using Snapchat assuming they can't be made public if they ran for
Congress or something. In fact, while people might have seen stupid YouTube or
Facebook posts from them, if they only retained a bookmark and didn't save a
copy, they could delete those embarrassing moments before their run and
terminate that license. In fact, because receiving users see Snapchat as
ephemeral, they're much more likely to save a copy of the image using a
screenshot than Facebook users are. Facebook/YouTube users often assume that
the content they see will be there in perpetuity.

------
teaneedz
Time after time Snapchat has shown it doesn't respect user privacy or
security. Now that this updated ToS is probably written to simply support
their new features, their historically amateurish attitude toward privacy will
come back and bite them. At times, I think Snapchat is worse than Facebook on
privacy. Yet, people don't seem to care. So users deserve the risks that
Snapchat brings. I'm done trying to point out how bad Snapchat is when others,
like Wickr, are so much better.

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alex_g
I don't understand... Snapchat's ToS has always said this. They have right to
access and profit off any of your content, but it remains the case that they
maintain the privacy level of that content. If you send a snap (non-story),
Snapchat has the right to do anything with it, so long as they do not violate
the privacy level (they can only show it to the people you sent it to).

And of course they have the right as employees, to look at any piece of
content.

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mfenniak
Here are the updated terms of service, if anyone wants to see them directly:
[https://www.snapchat.com/terms](https://www.snapchat.com/terms)

And Snapchat's privacy policy:
[https://www.snapchat.com/privacy](https://www.snapchat.com/privacy)

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iamsohungry
Quotes are wrong. Should be:

    
    
       Snapchat's 'new' scary privacy policy.

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waspleg
I know of people who would lose their jobs if some of their stuff went public.
I don't think that's what it's for though.

This seems to be more fodder for the insatiable targeted-ad/law enforcement
data crunching monster.

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PuffinBlue
It seems most large online services plod inexorably towards terms like these,
no matter their original starting position or principles.

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forgottenpass
The most delusional bit of the ToS:

 _By using the Services, you agree that: [...] You will not post content that
contains pornography,..._

If you don't want that on your service Snapchat, you should shut down shop
today.

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emergentcypher
By uploading your content to some private corporation, you might be giving
them the right to do whatever they want with it? Big surprise there!

------
mtgx
Start using Signal - the _real_ privacy app.

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TazeTSchnitzel
Is it a scary policy? Most have that paragraph verbatim to ensure they're able
to use your content.

~~~
newjersey
Yes, it is a scary policy for a product that billed itself as a platform to
send self-destructing messages. Snapchat has always lied and the fact that you
can pay to watch a snap again proves that the snaps do not go away after the
last recipient has viewed the snap. Of course, this is a violation of trust.

And they lie to this day:

> Please note: even though Snaps, Chats, and Stories are deleted from our
> servers after they expire, we cannot prevent recipient(s) from capturing and
> saving the message by taking a screenshot or using an image capture device.

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.snapchat.a...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.snapchat.android&hl=en)

~~~
hanspeter
How is it lying to admit that you can capture the image?

~~~
sk5t
The deletion--not the screenshot bit--may be a lie.

~~~
hanspeter
Ah, ok. But no one knows if they have stored any images. They have simply
updated their terms in order to not get sued if they choose to do so. As long
as they say that they're deleting photos from their servers there's no reason
to believe they're not.

~~~
newjersey
> As long as they say that they're deleting photos from their servers there's
> no reason to believe they're not.

There is no reason to believe they will delete any snap before all recipients
have viewed it once, or according to new policy, have viewed it once and paid
33¢ to replay it once (I'd imagine this could update to n times where n is a
number they decide in the future).

Imagine being able to use people's snaps for advertising online. Use a photo
of someone you watch a lot and put a picture of them smiling or a video of
them saying "I love you" (thanks to voice and or face recognition) in a
targeted advertisement... I believe Facebook tried something similar a while
back.

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mrcactu5
scary privacy policies just mean you share less stuff ?

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anon5_
Is there any other uses of snapchat outside sending nude photos?

Is it possible for Google to create a ToS that grants them all ownership of
email you send?

