Snapchat

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Snapchat is another Social Media messaging app create by former Stanford students Evan Spiegel, Bobby Murphy, and Reggie Brown. The idea was disappearing pictures so that kids could send each other dick pics (compromising material) that would go away... at least for those too stupid to screen capture it. The idea made Snapchat's audience much younger than the other Social media outlets. But the company also has a history of getting embarassingly hacked, and not having proper concerns about customer privacy.


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2019.05.23 Spying on Users - According to Vice "Snapchat Employees Abused Data Access to Spy on Users". Another not-shocking expose that with the help of two disgruntled former employees, Snapchat had spying tools like SnapLion (a play on LEO for Law-Enforcement Officer), and they would regularly abuse them to see personally identifiable information (location, photos, phone numbers, etc) of its users.

2019.04.11 Highschool Suspends Students for 2A - In a shockingly dumb move, a Highschool suspended students for Snapchatting that they went to their brothers gun range and snapchatted their event with the caption, "if there's ever a zombie apocalypse, you know where to go". The photos were not taken at school. They were not taken during school hours. They did not reference a school. They auto-deleted after 24 hours, which was well before the school became aware of them. And yet, administrators suspended the boys for three days, and also gave them weekend detention for having exercised their first and second amendment rights. The ACLU did their jobs, for once, and sued the school for poor judgement.

2014.05.08 FTC smacks Snapchat - Snapchat settled with the Federal Trade Commission and admitted that it deceived consumers with promises about the disappearing nature of messages. The company had deceived consumers over the amount of personal data it collected and the security measures taken to protect that data from misuse and unauthorized disclosure. Snapchat's "Find Friends" feature was poorly secured and resulted in data breech of 4.6 million Snapchat usernames and phone numbers. So they got smacked for marketing privacy and not doing the minimums required to protect it.

2013.12.31 Snaphacked - Gibson Security (Aussie Security firm) disclosed an API security vulnerability to the company in August, and released it on XMas. Snapchat had said they mitigated the compromise, but it took only a few days for Hackers to get around them and release 4.6 million Snapchat usernames and phone numbers on a website named "SnapchatDB.info". Snapchat later apologized.


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