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Privacy Rights in the Digital Age

Snapchat

by Scott Russell

A video-messaging application that allows users to send to other users text, pictures, videos, and drawings, called “snaps,” that will be automatically deleted after they are viewed by their recipients. In addition to sending snaps, Snapchat offers a My Story feature, which allows users to post snaps for up to twenty-four hours on their Story. A Story can be viewed by other users an unlimited number of times during that twenty-four-hour period. Snapchat also offers text and video chat functions, a multiuser-input called Our Story, and an electronic payment system called Snapcash. Snapchat is one of the most popular social media applications available, with estimates of approximately 200 million active monthly users.

Snapchat's central feature is that all snaps are ephemeral and will inevitably be deleted. Snapchat therefore allows users to communicate and express themselves through an online medium with the knowledge that they will not create a permanent record that can be subjected to future scrutiny. Snapchat co-creator Evan Spiegel has claimed that Snapchat differs from other social media by removing the requirement to cultivate an idealized online identity, instead allowing for a less inhibited form of expression. This ephemerality of snaps is also perceived to provide more robust privacy and security than more traditional forms of online communication, such as text messaging, although Snapchat cannot ultimately guarantee that the content of snaps will be deleted.

Indeed, Snapchat's ephemeral quality can be undermined through several methods, all allowing users to produce lasting copies of snaps. These include taking a screenshot of the phone while an image is being shown, taking a picture of the phone with another camera, or using one of several third-party apps designed specifically to store the transient snaps. One of these third-party “Snapchat scraper” apps was the subject of a massive data breach in 2014, dubbed the Snappening, which led to an estimated 100,000 snaps being publicly leaked on the Internet.

Snapchat's claim that it deletes all snaps stored on its servers is also subject to certain limitations, such as law enforcement warrants requesting file retention and the temporary retention of files on redundant backup servers. These shortcomings led the Federal Trade Commission to bring an enforcement action against Snapchat in 2013, claiming that it had misled its users about the privacy and security the app provided. In addition, Snapchat has been frequently criticized for poor privacy and security practices, being voted “most unreliable” by the Electronic Frontier Foundation in its 2014 report on privacy policies.

Notwithstanding these security concerns, Snapchat has proved to be a popular means for sending pictures or videos that are considered privacy-sensitive, such as those called sexting. Sexting (a portmanteau of sex and texting), refers to sexually explicit personal messages and can include anything from merely suggestive text to actual nude photographs. Sexting is a popular research subject, with particular interest on its prevalence among teenagers. Considering the sexually explicit nature of sexts, sending or receiving sexts often carries serious legal ramifications, particularly if the subject is under the age of consent. And because Snapchat's primary demographic is younger users, sexting among these users may violate child pornography laws. Thus, Snapchat has frequently been criticized for facilitating child pornography. Snapchat refutes these claims, however, pointing out that almost all photo-messaging applications create the potential for underage sexting.

Despite these concerns with teen sexting, research conducted by the University of Washington found that the majority of users claim to use Snapchat primarily for “funny content,” such as taking selfies with funny faces or drawn-on mustaches, not for sexting. This usage suggests less a desire for privacy than it does a desire to prevent snaps from being subjected to lasting scrutiny. And indeed many respondents cited not privacy but different social standards as their primary reason for using Snapchat. Online media entails a permanence that can stifle expression, and Snapchat offers a means of recapturing this freedom of expression that other forms of social media inhibit.

Snapchat may be viewed more broadly as an attempt to use technology to solve privacy and security problems created by the digital age. One of the many concerns among social media users is that their actions leave a permanent digital record, and that record is often owned and controlled by a third party. Even social media platforms that provide much control over content still retain records of that user's activity, and this threat of a permanent record for all online activity can seriously stifle free speech and uninhibited expression. Snapchat represents an attempt to circumvent this problem by creating a medium that utilizes the benefits of technology while also limiting some of these perceived negatives. Although Snapchat's technical solution is imperfect, it represents a novel approach to information sharing. Its success suggests that a market for similar privacy-protecting apps may have strong consumer support.

Thus, Snapchat is part of the broader trend in privacy that attempts to regulate data retention. Snapchat's primary appeal is that it inherently limits how long personal data is stored, both by itself and among its users. While Snapchat's data retention limits are integral to its design, some suggest these limitations should be imposed on all companies that manage personal data. Considering the amount of personal data that is shared with and controlled by third parties and the ease of storage, data retention limits are a proposed mechanism to reduce the extent this data can be subjected to lasting scrutiny. While there is currently no federal law limiting data retention by private companies generally, there are some limits for government agencies, and broader regulations are increasingly common abroad, most notably the European Union's “Right to Be Forgotten.”

Further Reading

1 

Cardoza, Nate, Cindy Cohn, Parker Higgins, Kurt Opsahl, and Rainey Reitman. Who Has Your Back: Protecting Your Data from Government Request. Electronic Frontier Foundation, May 15, 2014.

2 

Colao, J. J. “Snapchat: The Biggest No-Revenue Mobile App since Instagram.” Forbes, November 27, 2012.

3 

Crump, Catherine. “Data Retention: Privacy, Anonymity, and Accountability Online.” Stanford Law Review 56, no. 1 (2003): 191.

4 

“How Snaps Are Stored and Deleted.” Snapchat Blog, May 9, 2013.

5 

McBride, Sarah, and Alexei Oreskovic. “Snapchat Breach Exposes Flawed Premise, Security Challenge.” Reuters, October 14, 2014.

6 

Meyer, Robinson. “The New Terminology of Snapchat.” The Atlantic, May 2, 2014.

7 

Roesner, Franziska, Brian T. Gill, and Tadayoshi Kohno. “Sex, Lies, or Kittens? Investigating the Use of Snapchat's Self-Destructing Messages.” In Financial Cryptography and Data Security, vol. 8437 of the series Lecture Notes in Computer Science (November 9, 2014), 64–76.

8 

Shontell, Alyson. “Snap Is a Lot Bigger Than People Realize and It Could be Nearing 200 Million Active Users.” Business Insider, January 3, 2015.

9 

Strassberg, Donald, Ryan K. McKinnon, Michael A. Sustaíta, and Jordan Rullo. “Sexting by High School Students: An Exploratory and Descriptive Study.” Archives of Sexual Behavior 42, no. 1 (June 7, 2012): 15–21.

See also: Apps; Mobile devices; Right to Be Forgotten; Sexting; Social Media; Social networking technologies

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
Russell, Scott. "Snapchat." Privacy Rights in the Digital Age, edited by Christopher T. Anglim & JD, Salem Press, 2016. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=PRDA_0193.
APA 7th
Russell, S. (2016). Snapchat. In C. Anglim & JD (Ed.), Privacy Rights in the Digital Age. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Russell, Scott. "Snapchat." Edited by Christopher T. Anglim & JD. Privacy Rights in the Digital Age. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2016. Accessed September 17, 2025. online.salempress.com.