We’ve been here before, most infamously with the Winklevoss brothers’ lawsuit against Facebook claiming that CEO , they ended the lawsuit and settled for a mixture of cash and Facebook shares.
Whether Brown gets his day in court or reaches a settlement with Snapchat remains to be seen, but for now the lawsuit is a cloud hovering over the company.
That’s partly down to journalists who didn’t really understand Snapchat fastening onto the sauciest angle when covering it. But only partly.
There’s been plenty of discussion about just how private Snapchat is, whether that’s apps like Snapchat Hack, which circumvents Snapchat’s protection and allows people to share images, or the discovery that on Android “deleted” photos are merely hidden on the device, and can be retrieved with the right forensic software.
Consequences? In , a Tumblr blog called Snapchat Sluts published photos of topless women, although it claimed the images were all submitted willingly. A Facebook page called Snapchat Leaked, which claimed to be posting saved Snapchat images without permission, was shut down in May, meanwhile.
Claims that the FBI is warning parents about paedophiles using Snapchat aren’t backed up by any mention of the app on the agency’s website, but separate worries about cyberbullies using the app are very real – for example this Mirror story about a girl bullied through the app, and her mother’s concern about the way the messages often disappeared before her daugher could show them to her.
Snapchat isn’t the only social networking service to be facing these kinds of concerns – is also in the spotlight for cyberbullying, for example. On one hand, Snapchat is trying to take a responsible approach, such as publishing a Guide for Parents in PDF form.
On the other hand, the company appears touchy about being pressed on such subjects. Witness the disclosure at the end of the Palisadian Post interview cited earlier: “Spiegel agreed to be interviewed by the Palisadian Post under the guideline that no controversial questions would be asked. He also would not let this reporter audiotape the interview”.
6. Actually, sexting isn’t Snapchat’s appeal for teenagers
This is a key point: some people are sexting using Snapchat, and some of those people are teenagers. But the main appeal (and thus the importance) of Snapchat is about ephemeral messaging, and the desire to leave less digital tracks, with teenagers having watched the social over-sharing of the generation that came before them.
“When I asked teenagers about Snapchat late last summer, I heard again and again that they liked it because the ephemeral nature of the content allowed them to be themselves – to share a weird or ugly or banal picture that they would have been uncomfortable posting on other well-known social networks for fear of getting dissed,” wrote Mitch Lasky in his blog post.
Fellow investor Bill Gurley of Benchmark Capital backed him up on that point during an appearance at TechCrunch’s Disrupt conference in Berlin in October:
Snapchat has been associated with sexting right from its earliest days, despite the company’s protests
“For kids, the internet is increasingly becoming a place that you can’t go to the website share, that you can’t have fun, that you can’t socialize in the way you want to. I think that’s really the essence of Snapchat. It’s a platform where they can communicate and have fun without any anxiety about the permanence. You hear about kids not getting jobs because of what’s on their Facebook page.”
Snapchat isn’t the only beneficiary: messaging apps like WhatsApp are huge among teenagers for similar reasons. Facebook’s stock price wobbled in October after its chief financial officer David Ebersman told analysts that “we did see a ong younger teens” in its last quarter.