My Little Sister Taught Me How to “Snapchat Like the Teens”

In WHAT moment? That moment when someone snapchats a snapchat for the sake of snapchatting?

Hey, I have a 14yo son who texts like a maniac and never takes his earbuds out of his ears. He has hundreds of thousands of views on his G+ profile, which is the thing him and his friends are all over. But lately they've moved to Facebook because they follow their favorite Bands' pages.

It's so confusing.

If our parents wanted to know what was going on in our lives, they quietly picked up the other phone on the land-line in the house and eavesdropped.

Now, we have to snoop and lurk on our kids' social profiles, or try to sneak a peak at their texts when their phones buzz.

An sms/mms appear in the form of a chat and you are like compelled to answer, at least to tell them that you got it.

    BROOKE: I look at the new filters. Those are VERY big.
            I’ve only bought about three of them, but
            there are new ones, like, every day.

There would be obvious commercial advantage in doing this, just for starters.

Data mining services like facebook gives you a solid picture of the interests and connections that the target person broadcasts publicaly. This is useful information, and it is exploited by any number of parties ... and people are (hopefully) aware of that.

Data mining snapchat gives a deeper picture of a person's interests and connections, as they are broadcast whilst that person believes that this information is entirely private.

Aggregating data from both sources (which would be almost trivial), would provide a very detailed view of the target. Much more than the sum of each dataset alone.

And it matters not whether the owners of Snapchat are completely and utterly above-board with everything .... there is the question of who owns and operates the network that all this info travels over.

Bottom line is that all of that "ephemeral" data that is going through snapchat is no more private than facebook, or youtube, or HAM radio, or telephone calls, or email, or SMS, or pretty much anything electronic.

There is no real privacy with this, but its easy to provide the illusion of privacy.

Snapchat attempts to use technology to enforce the social contract of "please don't repeat everything I say to everyone you know, and don't hoard it indefinitely", which is established protocol for, say, actual in-person conversations. By implementing a casual form of endpoint security, a non-sophisticated actor at the receiving end may not break this social contract without repercussions, since nominally, only the official client can get the payload; the official client deletes the payload upon receipt, and if the official client detects that a screenshot was taken or the message was saved, it notifies the sender. That's the feature, not off-the-record messaging.