February 23, 2022
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0Snapchat Leaks: Is Snapchat Really a Safe App to Use?
A couple of years ago, the internet was gripped by hysteria around Snapchat. This application for instantly sending cool photos to your friends broke out on the first line of the app store, bypassing popular messengers and applications.
Over time and with the advent of Instagram stories, Snapchat’s popularity has declined somewhat. Instead, it has become just a camera application that can apply various masks and filters to people’s faces.
However, it was not this function that brought notoriety to this application, but rather the scandals around Snapchat’s leaked user data.
Today, we will talk about Snapchat, its functions, and the security side.
The list of big security fails in 2021 is here.
What is Snapchat?
Snapchat is an interesting messenger designed for communication between users.
The key features of the program are:
- Destruction of videos after viewing.
- No automatic saving of photos taken.
- Lack of integration with other services or list of contacts.
- No likes and comments, and subscribers are not supported.
- Photos and videos can only be vertical.
Communication in Snapchat can be private or broadcast: posts will be visible to all contacts or just a few people, at the user’s discretion. The bright interface of the program promotes communication on frivolous topics. Of course, you can also send answers to exam papers, but the content sent on this app is generally pretty light.
You can send media files and, of course, text. They are erased from the phone’s memory immediately after reading. They remain only in the user’s head.
However, there is a minus: if you opened the video but could not hear anything, you will not be able to watch anything again unless the user sends it to you again. It’s the same with the text.
So, messages do not clutter up the phone’s memory. As a result, there is no need to clean the application’s cache on your device regularly.
When you launch the app, it immediately directs you to the camera. This allows you to take an instant photo and immediately send it. If you open the app via a message notification, then it goes straight to the chat.
There is one life hack: If you pinned a message, then protection is imposed on it, and it does not disappear until the user releases it himself.
How to protect your data in dating apps. Learn more here.
Additional Snapchat features
You can create your own story on Snapchat. This is a kind of feed in any social network. It is stored for a day and then disappears as if it never existed.
The avatar in the form of a circle works on the clock principle – it indicates the time after which the story will be deleted.
You can also see who watched your story by clicking on the views icon. The more creative the content, the larger the audience and more views, so you should try it.
By swiping up, you can open a message window to reply to the story owner regarding the video or photo. This will not be a comment under the post, which will be visible to everyone, but a personal message to the post’s author.
Snapchat’s sexting
Just as secure messengers like Telegram have become a popular way for terrorists to communicate, Snapchat has become a major platform for sharing intimate photos or sexting. Of course, disappearing messages do not guarantee that your picture will not be publicly available the next day, but they reduce the risk of such an outcome.
For example, an offended ex-boyfriend will not be able to post nude pictures of an ex-girlfriend if she sends them via Snapchat. And yet, even in the app’s description in the App Store, users are warned: snap chatters can capture your messages by taking a screenshot or taking a picture with a camera, so think about what you send.
It is impossible to name the proportion of users who use Snapchat for sexting. But there are a lot of forums and sites on the internet that specialize in finding accounts in social networks for viewing/sharing intimate pictures. Then, all the leaked photos are floating around on the network.
Learn more about your photo protection on the internet here.
Snapchat leaks scandals
In 2018, the owner of the Snapchat messenger fired 20 employees of the London and New York divisions after information for internal use appeared in the media.
In May 2018 on GitHub, the largest web service for hosting and joint development of IT projects, a user under the nickname i5xx created a repository containing the source files of the Snapchat iOS application. After a while, at the request of Snap Inc., the repository was deleted, but the sources have already leaked to the Network. In all of May, shares of Snap Inc. did not rise above the $12 per share mark, even though in 2017 when entering the IPO, this price reached $25.50 per share.
About leaked snaps
On August 7, news appeared on the well-known website the Hacker News that the sources of the popular Snapchat application were merged into public access on GitHub. Snap Inc. sent a request to GitHub to delete the repository due to a violation of the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act). After a while, the repository was blocked.
As explained by Snap Inc., in May 2018, the update of the iOS version of Snapchat accidentally revealed part of the source codes of the application. The developers claim that the error was quickly corrected, and the leak did not affect the security of the service and its users in any way, but the hackers saved the source codes and then began to put them in open access.
Conclusion: Delete Snapchat now!
When you press the delete button on your mobile phone, the space that Snapchat occupies in the internal memory of your mobile phone is freed up. And that’s almost all. In addition, since your account data is not stored locally but on a remote Snapchat server, deleting the application will not damage your account data.
On the other hand, deleting your Snapchat account is more serious than simply deleting it. When you delete your Snapchat account and don’t return for 30 days, all data associated with your account is permanently deleted. As a result, your friends can’t find you on Snapchat, and all the memories you might have saved over the years will be deleted from the server.
Deleting your Snapchat account is an irreversible process, but deleting the Snapchat app is not.
There are no fully protected applications. Large companies and the information security community practice the so-called bug bounty. Amateur hackers find bugs in applications and upload them to special resources, where representatives of the relevant companies assess the threat level of the vulnerabilities and how much it will cost to address them.
But pay attention to Utopia P2P and be under online security all the time.
Read more about Utopia P2P benefits here.
