Tag Archives: snapchat

Actually, Snapchat Photos Are Just As Deleted As Any Other File You Trash

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Though Snapchat has been picked on, picked apart, and blown up in the media, the technical aspects of the service are still somewhat mysterious to the average user. A new research report from a company called Decipher Forensics is looking to shed a little light on how the service “deletes” photos you send through Snapchat.

According to Decipher, Snapchat photos are renamed with a .jpgnomedia extension to hide that photo from your phone, under /data/data/com.snapchat.android. The computer forensics company claims that they can retrieve these photos both before and after they’ve expired within the app.

The only catch is that you need to use their $9,000 forensic software, and you’re in luck! They’re only charging $300 to $600 to do so.

This is what we, in the media industry, like to call FUD. Or worse, FUD to drive sales.

We did our own digging, with the help of AndroidCentral’s Phil Nickinson and Jerry Hildebrand, and discovered that Snapchat is actually doing exactly what it promises it’s doing.

Here’s the scoop.

Decipher’s findings only relate to rooted Android smartphones, and require the use of this special, expensive forensic software. When Phil and Jerry tried to break into a rooted HTC One to see all the dirty snaps hiding under the surface, they actually found that you can only retrieve Snapchat photos before they’ve expired.

In fact, Snapchat does rename the file when its sent to your phone. First, the sender takes the picture, which is sent to Snapchat servers, and then delivered to the phone. Once the photo is delivered to the recipient, Snapchat deletes that photo off of its servers, so the only alternative is that it’s stored locally on the phone.

To keep it from showing up in your gallery or elsewhere, Snapchat hides the photo with the .jpgnomedia extension that Decipher mentioned. As Phil explained, “Snapchat has to see the photo to serve up to you, right?”

Jerry and Phil confirmed that, on a rooted phone, while the photo is delivered but still unopened, users can absolutely delve into the file system and retrieve, rename, and view these photos. This app helps. That’s what happens when you root your phone and open it up.

However, once the photo is opened, and the timer goes off, Snapchat does in fact delete the photo. Phil and Jerry confirmed that they could no longer retrieve photos once they were expired.

Decipher argues that those photos aren’t deleted, and remain renamed with the .jpgnomedia extension even after they expire. But, our own digging proved otherwise. Phil and Jerry said that once the photo expired on Snapchat, the “original file in the protected data folder was no longer available, and was deleted.”

Of course, a company like Decipher can still retrieve photos once they’ve expired because they have the software to do so. The same software that retrieves deleted child porn from pedophiles computers, and the same software that digs through digital trash cans for incriminating bank statements, emails, etc.

But your average Joe, or even AndroidCentral tinkering wizards, can’t actually dig into the phone and find all the embarrassing snaps you’ve sent them.

This comes down to the nature of deletion. When you delete something from your computer, it’s not actually gone. No, not even if you empty the trash can. Instead, the file is re-designated (much like Snapchat renames photos that haven’t been opened) to make it so that photo is non-viewable, and doesn’t surface in the Finder.

It’s not until the bits that comprise the file, a series of 1′s and 0′s, are written over that the file is actually gone, and replaced with something new.

So, if you delete a picture on your computer, and empty the trash can, I would have a tough time finding that picture. Decipher Forensics? It would take them no time at all.

Here’s what Snapchat co-founder Evan Spiegel had to say in a snarky response to Decipher’s findings:

There are many ways to save snaps that you receive. The easiest way is to take a screenshot or take a photo with another camera. Snaps are deleted from our servers after they have been viewed by the recipient.

Long story short, don’t panic. And chew on this: Snapchat wasn’t built to be a super secure messaging platform. The whole reason for the self-destructing pictures isn’t to keep your titty shots safe; it’s to create a new type of sharing wherein you live in the moment, not in the digital footprint you leave behind.

Friendly reminder: Your Snapchat photos are still stored on your phone

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A forensics firm has found that Snapchat, an app whose killer feature is that it deletes photos sent between users once they’ve been viewed, does not actually delete photos once they’ve been viewed. According to KSL.com, the app saves the images to the device and, once they’re viewed, changes the file extension so they’re no longer accessible.

Utah-based Decipher Forensics claims that the photos take about six hours to extract, though most of that time is spent imaging the phone’s data. So far, Decipher has only managed to penetrate Android phones. The images reside in a folder on the recipient’s device named RECEIVED_IMAGES_SNAPS.

Once the files have been viewed within the time constraints of the app, the app affixes the extension .NOMEDIA to make it less readable. However, if the files are extracted and the extension is changed, the images are viewable once again.

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Facebook hopes to lure Instagram, Snapchat users with prettier redesign

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Facebook is focusing on feeds, including one for photos and one for brands.

At a press conference held in Menlo Park Thursday Facebook announced a redesign for the News Feed its users see when they visit its site or use its mobile app. The new News Feed focuses on reducing clutter, making visually oriented posts like photos more prominent. It also makes filters for types of content front and center, such as dedicated feeds for posts by friends or posts by pages.

Facebook will borrow the menu format it uses on its current mobile app, which slides out from one side to allow users to navigate. Facebook asserts that this will decrease clutter on the webpage and allow users to focus on content in the News Feed. The separate feed categories (Photos, Friends, Following) will reorganize themselves based on which one users view most.

A consistent menu across Facebook’s apps and Web interface.

The Following feed, which contains posts from pages, will show “every one of the posts they make,” stated Chris Struhar, the tech lead of feeds. The prominence of this feed seems to be an attempt to quell the protests of brands that have pushed back against Facebook’s pay-to-promote posts feature. Some brands have accused Facebook of purposefully damping traffic to generate revenue this way.

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Stanford Grad Files Lawsuit Claiming He Came Up With Snapchat, Snapchat Calls Lawsuit “Devoid Of Merit”

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In what appears to be a cyclical recurrence of post-success litigation, Snapchat is being sued by a man from South Carolina named Frank Reginald Brown IV, who claims that he originally came up with the idea for the ephemeral picture messaging app.

The idea for Snapchat is simple, yet has been widely misunderstood by older generations: you take a picture or video of yourself (or something else if you choose), set a time limit, and send the picture off to a friend. The app will only let the user view the picture for the pre-set period of time, no more than ten seconds.

Many assumed that it was built for sexting, which seems more and more ridiculous every day considering Snapchat’s booming growth. (It’s also worth noting that co-founder Evan Spiegel has said Snapchat has decided to push major updates during the hours of 11pm to 4am because it’s the slowest time for traffic.)

Brown and his lawyer, K. Luan Tran, claim that Brown conceived of the idea for Snapchat, and co-founders Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy called it “a million dollar idea.” The L.A. Times reports that, after working on the app together all summer under the name Picaboo, Spiegel and Murphy changed passwords to the servers and shut Brown out.

Brown even claims that he came up with the ghost logo that is still being used today. A picture posted by the L.A. Times appears to show Brown sitting with Snapchat co-founders Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy over a cake with the yellow Snapchat ghost logo frosted on.

This doesn’t prove or disprove anything except that the trio knew each other, but it’ll clearly take a court case to get to the bottom of all of this. However, it is interesting that the Snapchat logo (which never fully made sense to me) seems much more suited to a name like Picaboo.

Luan Tran, Brown’s lawyer, claims that Brown is looking for restored rights and any damages he may be owed.

Snapchat has responded with the following:

We are aware of the allegations, believe them to be utterly devoid of merit, and will vigorously defend ourselves against this frivolous suit. It would be inappropriate to comment further on this pending legal matter.

It’s also worth remembering that Snapchat just closed a solid Series A round — $13.5 million led by Benchmark Capital, to be exact.

It wouldn’t be the first time that a college project among classmates has turned into a multi-million dollar business. And we all know, where there is money, there will be blood.

We’ve reached out to Luan Tran for comment, but he has not immediately responded.

Ten Days After Private Beta Launch, Snapchat Officially Brings Video To Android

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It was just ten days ago that Snapchat launched a private beta version of its Android app, updated to include the video capture feature we’ve come to enjoy on iOS.

Today, however, the company has turned it around, making the Snapchat with video application officially available in the Google Play. Store. Co-founder Evan Spiegel mentioned to us earlier in the month that developing Snapchat for Android can be difficult, since Snapchat’s video feature needs to be compatible across a number of different processors, screen sizes, etc.

As it stands now, the update is available for Android 2.2 and later.

Here’s what co-founder Daniel Smith had to say in a blog post:

Making Snapchat video for Android has been exciting, but has also had its fair share of challenges. The Android phones that many of us use were never designed with Snapchat in mind, and that can be tough when developing a hardware-based application. The video feeds and playback behavior can differ greatly – often with no guarantees or warnings. Some users will still experience difficulties, and we want to work with you to make Snapchat perfect (email us!), but we hope many of you simply come to love video snaps.

The update also brings with it a few tweaks to the UI, including a revamped notification system. Now you should have a bit more control and customization when it comes to incoming snaps from your friends. Users will also notice that general Snapchat behavior will be much smoother on Android moving forward, as the company has redesigned the camera to improve frame rates and navigation speed.

Snapchat has had a great year, raising $13.5 million from Benchmark, launching on Android, and growing to see over 60 million snaps a day.

Snapchat Raises $13.5M Series A Led By Benchmark, Now Sees 60M Snaps Sent Per Day

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Snapchat, the impermanent messaging app that won “Fastest Rising Startup” at the 2012 Crunchies, has finalized a $13.5 million Series A round led by Benchmark’s Mitch Lasky.

According to The New York Times, Snapchat is now valued between $60 and $70 million. In December, GigaOm’s Om Malik reported that Snapchat was raising an $8 million round from Benchmark at roughly a $50 million valuation; and our own Eric Eldon wrote that Snapchat was raising a Series A “north of $10 million” at a rough $70 million valuation, led by Lasky.

Snapchat co-founder Evan Spiegel confirmed the funding to me, and noted that the company now sees 60 million snaps sent per day, and users have sent over 5 billion snaps in total. The company has hired five new employees, bringing the total staff to 10, and has moved to a new office in Venice Beach, CA.

Spiegel tells me the company will use the funding for “hiring and servers, definitely. But most importantly, it allows us to remain independent and continue to grow the Snapchat community.”

The Times also reported that Mark Zuckerberg met with the Snapchat team in December, shortly before Facebook launched carbon copy competitor Poke.

Snapchat previously raised $485,000 from Lightspeed Venture Partners.

“I started hearing Snapchat in the same context as Twitter, Instagram and Facebook,” Lasky said to The Times, echoing Barry Eggers’ sentiments when he led Lightspeed’s investment. “That got me curious.”

Update: Lasky has posted about Snapchat on his personal blog, explaining that he will be joining the company’s board of directors along with Spiegel and co-founder Bobby Murphy.

“At Benchmark we search for entrepreneurs who want to change the world, and Evan and Bobby certainly have that ambition. We believe that Snapchat can become one of the most important mobile companies in the world, and Snapchat’s initial momentum — 60 million shared “snaps” per day, over 5 billion sent through the service to date — supports that belief. Snapchat’s ramp reminded us of another mobile app Benchmark had the good fortune to back at an early stage: Instagram.”

Lasky also noted that he spent most of his career in LA, where Snapchat’s offices are.

Facebook’s High-Stakes Poker Game

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Editor’s note: Antone Johnson is a startup lawyer specializing in early-stage consumer Internet and location-based businesses, with particular emphasis on social and digital media. Before founding his own firm, he served as eHarmony’s first VP of Legal Affairs and was one of the original in-house lawyers at Myspace. Follow him on Twitter @antonejohnson.

“Ma’am, we at the FBI do not have a sense of humor that we’re aware of.” – Tommy Lee Jones, Men In Black

Is it juvenile to snicker at the obvious double entendre of Facebook’s new ephemeral messaging app, Poke, given its utility for sexting? If so, send me back to repeat sophomore year, but the powers-that-be are unlikely to crack a grin.

Facebook has rightly been accused of creating a slavish copy of Snapchat, a viral sensation that surpassed one billion shared photos last month.  The speed with which Facebook was able to emulate and release a competing app – 12 days in the making, according to Facebook’s Blake Ross – is cited as an example of the competitive threat Facebook and other giants pose to new social startups. Yet Poke may turn out to be a poster child for why most multi-billion-dollar public companies try not to break things, and as a consequence, are often precluded from moving fast like startups.

It would be foolish for most companies to build a clone and expect it to succeed at all, let alone approach Snapchat’s massive usage, but Facebook isn’t your ordinary competitor. With its billion active users, trove of personal data and immediate access to their social graphs, the network effects are unparalleled. Facebook also has unique competitive disadvantages on multiple fronts that could render Poke a crippling liability for the company; paradoxically, the more successful Poke becomes, the more it may hurt the company as a whole.

Facebook has grappled with the consequences of its market dominance for years. The recent ruckus over Terms of Use changes for Instagram under its ownership is only the latest example of Facebook’s uneasy relationship with the public on privacy issues. The company’s governing philosophy of stretching the boundaries of personal transparency while simultaneously insisting on the use of real-world identities – coupled with its tendency to ask for forgiveness rather than permission – has drawn the ire of regulators and advocacy groups.

More than any other company, Facebook surely appreciates the extent to which massive use of a social service draws massive abuse, as predators “go fishing where the fish are.” The sheer volume of tragic incidents involving teens at Myspace and Facebook forced the companies to come to the table and strike a “voluntary” deal in 2008 with attorney generals nationwide to address vexing, persistent child-safety issues.  The thousands of smaller sites were largely ignored. Scale can make all the difference between benign obscurity and CEOs being hauled into Congressional committee hearings.

Setting aside the debate over what proportion of usage and growth is driven by sexting, the ability to send images that disappear after no more than 10 seconds using an app that alerts the sender if the recipient takes a screen shot, removes some psychological barriers. The percentage of total “snaps” involving nudity may be low, but the possibility that interactions could take that turn at any moment undoubtedly adds a charge to the hormone-flooded young brain. Speaking from experience at Myspace, a site that banned outright nudity from inception, our young user base had seemingly infinite desire to push the boundaries and circumvent those rules at every opportunity. They also knew that to freely exchange nude images they had to go elsewhere: From ImageShack or Photobucket to Kik or MMS. Today, Snapchat is that elsewhere; tomorrow it may be Poke.

There’s nothing inherently problematic or illegal about sexting between consenting adults, but minors are another story. Law enforcement is currently grappling with a head-on conflict between the realities of teen behavior and the legal status of sexting images: Possession and distribution of child pornography is a serious felony – one of the FBI’s highest enforcement priorities – punishable by lengthy prison sentences and registration as a sex offender. Authorities often use discretion not to prosecute peer sexting incidents among teens, rightly viewing those laws as disproportionately harsh for the context. Yet that doesn’t mitigate the fact that a service such as Snapchat (and now Poke) at any given time is guaranteed to be in possession of thousands or millions of images the FBI considers to be “contraband.”

If there is one existential threat to Snapchat, assuming its continued popularity and eventual revenue model, this is it. Even if we instantly became comfortable as a society with sexting among teens as relatively benign (fat chance), there will still be interactions between adults and minors. As it scales to tens of millions of users and ugly headlines begin to appear about creepy use by sexual predators, it’s a certainty that law enforcement will come knocking with search warrants in hand for records in cases of suspected underage porn and solicitation of minors.

Encryption keys be damned; under the right kind of court order or warrant, services will be compelled to retain and produce some images and data for specific users. (Privacy advocates may be outraged at the concept that “ephemeral messaging” isn’t completely ephemeral, but consider how you would react if a 35-year-old man were sending pictures of his genitalia, however ephemeral, to your 13-year-old daughter.)  This is why Snapchat, like most social media services, includes “CYA” language in its privacy policy:  “We may share your personal information with third parties… [to] comply with laws or to respond to lawful requests and legal process.”

These issues aren’t new, of course. Myspace at its peak received hundreds of law enforcement subpoenas and warrants each month. We also employed and ultimately outsourced an army of image reviewers. Age and identity verification have been thorny challenges throughout the age of social media. That didn’t stop state attorney generals from ganging up on MySpace and Facebook in 2007 to demand action on child online safety.  The pressure to “do something” was intense, and companies resist such demands at their peril.

At scale, the gravest threats are political and reputational. When asked, “What are you going to do about this?” the acceptable CEO answer is not “nothing.” Snapchat and its investors may have thought a few moves ahead in this chess game, but if they have a brilliant solution to prevent the kind of abuses that come with scale, I’d love to hear about it.

Returning to Poke, Facebook faces a unique competitive disadvantage from its long history dealing with child-safety issues, its ubiquity, and unparalleled scale. Simply put, Facebook will be held to a higher standard than startups from day one. Unlike Snapchat and others, Facebook can’t plead ignorance or lack of resources to address abuse issues that accompany explosive growth. In fact, no other company in the world has access to the same range of resources and depth of knowledge in the area of online social interaction among teens and adults.

This is not a technical problem that can be solved by engineering or sheer resources. It’s a byproduct of a legal regime that makes the same interaction perfectly legal between two adults; not-really-legal-but-essentially-unstoppable between two minors; and a felony involving prison time and sex offender registration between an adult and a minor. Anything Facebook does to make the product cleaner or safer is likely to degrade the user experience, add friction to new user registration, and so on. These tradeoffs could well keep Poke a “PG-rated” product with the accountability of real-name, real-identity culture, while the more adventurous remain over at Snapchat – at least until it too gets called on the carpet.

Inside Snapchat, The Little Photo-Sharing App That Launched A Sexting Scare

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It started with an assumption, really. Snapchat, a photo-sharing application that auto-destroys images seconds after being opened, launched in September 2011 with zero media coverage. A homegrown product, built by two Stanford guys, grew to now see over 50 million snaps per day today. In fact, Facebook launched a clone of the app just Friday.

It wasn’t until the company made its first milestone announcement, nine months after launch, that the media picked up the story. The New York Times’ Nick Bilton whipped out all this cute PEW research on sexting in adults and teens, and referenced “suggestive” marketing materials and even pointed out the app’s “mild sexual content or nudity” warning.

From that moment on, whether in milestone achievements, feature and expansion announcements, or stories about Facebook’s new Snapchat clone, Snapchat was branded a sexting app.

The Myth

Snapchat is a lot like Pinterest. Coverage of the service came way later than its troves of users.

Being late, and of a different generation than the majority of the app’s users, many members of the media jumped on the click-happy sexting story instead of the truth.

“We were worried that usage and growth would decrease if the sexting publicity made Snapchatters feel uncomfortable,” said co-founder Evan Spiegel. “In hindsight we shouldn’t have underestimated the loyalty and creativity of our community. The uptake has been remarkable.”

And it has been. Snapchat is currently sending over 50 million snaps per day, with over 1 billion sent in total. Plus, word on the street is that Snapchat is raising a round of funding between $8 and $10 million. And up until this Friday, there were also rumors that Facebook was launching a clone, and it did.

Snapchat suddenly became a huge deal, and the urge to understand it (and explain its success) became important. And in the mind of tech reporters, the blogosphere, and the general media, there’s only one explanation for using an app that sends and then destroys self-portraits: sexting.

And the app’s marketing materials and app user warning didn’t help. The original screenshots on display in the App Store were of pretty girls in bikinis. The app warned of “Mature/Suggestive Themes” and “Infrequent/Mild Sexual Content or Nudity.”

“To be fair, our early marketing materials were a bit amateurish. I took those photos on the beach with friends,” said Spiegel. “They were fun and playful at the time, but didn’t represent how the app was actually being used.”

The Conspiracy

Whatever Spiegel’s intentions, the media ran with the sexting story. After all, in a media that loves turning a sclerotic eye on made-up teenage perversity (“rainbow parties,” “jenkem”), Snapchat was solid gold.

Best of all, this Snap-sex trend was lining up with the evidence. There was even a Tumblr site called Snapchat Sluts documenting one man’s sexting rampage.

The confusion is understandable, given the nature of the app and its self-destructing pictures. The media are a generation of tech users that are incredibly obsessed with privacy. We would make this logical leap in the wake of Anthony Weiner and every teenage girl who’s ended up with a nude pic on the internet.

In any case, story after story popped up about Snapchat, all of which mentioned it’s popularity among sexting teens.

Turns out, almost every reporter to use both the words Snapchat and sexting in an article is a user on Snapchat. I know this because Buzzfeed discovered Snapchat has public user profiles on the internet, showing users top three most frequently snapped-with friends and their Snapchat score (a count of Snaps sent and received on the platform).

These writers fall into two categories: real users who are active on the platform (which is clear from their scores), and users who downloaded the app , used it once or twice to better understand it, and then wrote a story on it.

I learned that the former group is predominantly chatting with each other. For example, Katie Notopolous of BuzzFeed, who wrote this story about Snapchat’s super risky public profiles, chats with Gawker’s Max Read (who wrote this) and her Buzzfeed colleague John Herrman, and both Herrman and Notopolous chat with a Gizmodo writer Sam Biddle. Sam snaps occasionally with less active user Joel Johnson, longtime Gizmodo employee.

Then there’s the folks who’ve written about Snapchat being the sexting app, but barely ever use it, like Gizmodo’s Adrian Covert (story), GigaOm’s Eliza Kern (story), CNET’s Jason Parker (story), and the NYT’s Nick Bilton (story). Yep, the same guy who started the myth doesn’t even use the app.

There are two conclusions we can make. The first is that the same folks who serve you a round of tech news with your morning coffee and bagel are also in a Snapchat sexting ring. The second option is that the very same people who have repeatedly assumed that Snapchat is for sexting, and propagated that myth, don’t use Snapchat for sexting at all.

Weird, huh?

The Facts

“Social media has generally relied on surveillance as the mechanism for stimulating feelings of connectedness,” Spiegel explained. “We’ve found that using Snapchat to live and share in the moment can make you feel like you’re face-to-face with a friend even if they’re on another continent.”

Truth is, there can never be any evidence that Snapchat is used primarily for sexting because the service deletes photos immediately after they’re opened, both from the recipient’s phone and from their servers. This means that there can not be any real evidence for or against sexting on Snapchat.

And you know what? By a very small percentage of users, Snapchat probably is used for sexting for a very small percentage of the time.

When you’re sending over 50 million snaps a day, a few of them are bound to be of naughty bits. But 80 percent of those snaps are sent during the day, with a spike during school hours. Whatever the sexting stats may be, they’re more likely using Snapchat to cheat on tests than to sext.

Snapchat wasn’t built for sexting, which seems clear from the fact that pictures self-destruct in less time than it takes to fully enjoy a nude pic. But some see this as a security feature for sexting, which is a matter of opinion.

However, the UI (which is actually quite amateur) doesn’t really suggest “Let’s Get It On,” with lots of yellow and bubbly blue and a friendly ghost for a mascot. Valid, but still an opinion, and one which opponents can argue is meant to lure young demographics to the sexting platform. Let’s, instead, focus on the evidence.

The user warning on the app, referenced in many Snapchat articles, means nothing. Every photo sharing app has one like it. Check out Instagram’s.

Also often referenced, the “suggestive” marketing images (which have since been swapped for new ones) were a mistake, but not one worth crucifying the app for.

And let’s not forget that Facebook just cloned this app with Poke. Is Facebook really trying to tap into teen sexting? Probably not. They’re tapping into something much bigger than that.

The Real Story

There is a big difference between the way a 24-year-old and a 19-year-old see social networking. It seems like a small gap, but some crucial changes happened during this time that has most certainly differentiated today’s teenager from yesterday’s.

The first was the release of the iPhone in 2007, which changed photo-sharing as we know it. People take photos of anything and everything now, because their camera is in their pocket, and uploading those photos to the internet takes three clicks, tops.

The second crucial change was the public opening of Facebook in 2006.

My sister is 19 and I am 24. I was 19 when the iPhone came out, and I was a senior in high school when I first got Facebook, a year before it launched publicly.

My sister was 14 when the iPhone came out, first got on Facebook at age 13. Unlike myself, her friends have had smartphones (and have been taking pictures with them) throughout their entire high school (and now college) career. And many of them are now documented neatly on her Timeline.

The pressure to maintain an appropriate, attractive presence on the Internet has weighed on me since college. It’s been with her for her entire life.

This is the difference between the people writing about Snapchat and the people using it.

My sister is one of the biggest Snapchat users I know, and the pictures she sends me of herself are awful. That’s not the usual for her. She’s 19, and will force our family to stand in 100-degree weather for hours to get the perfect shot of her smile.

The snaps she sends me could be called ugly — her on the porch, in the dark, with a goofy look on her face. If she was posting this on Facebook, or Instagram, or even sending it to me on MMS, it wouldn’t be the same picture. It wouldn’t be so ugly.

But there’s an intimacy that comes with Snapchat that makes those pictures safe, and much more enjoyable than seeing yet another perfect picture of my sister on Facebook. I see her as she really is.

It’s about as real as you can get in a world where everything happens through an all-seeing eye of 1′s and 0′s.