According to 4Chan, the Snappening is imminent.
Hackers have warned that thousands of nude images sent via the mobile-messaging service Snapchat, many of which users believed self-destructed after being sent, are to be released online in a searchable database.
Messaging boards on the notorious website 4chan have been filling up with news of the imminent leak, already being referred to as “The Snappening”.
Snapchat is one of the tiny handful of tech ideas that survive the initial chuckle, filling a peculiar niche for people who want to show someone an image, but only once, and then have it disappear into the ether. It’s not entirely clear why this is a desirable feature, but it is for some. The reason for wanting an image to disappear isn’t hard to understand; what makes this dubious is the need to show the image at all if it’s not an image that a person wants to keep around.
Given the nature of the Snapchat service, many of the images are expected to be of an explicit nature, while the young demographic of Snapchat’s users could mean that some of the images released constitute child pornography.
There are some, supposedly mature enough to be credible voices, who argue that there is an entitlement to enjoy the creation and distribution of their own sexually explicit image as some nouvelle sort of sexual freedom, without suffering the indignity of others stepping on their pleasure. Perhaps so, much as any automobile driver is entitled to leave an iPad sitting on the front seat of his car in a mall parking lot. It’s not a crime to be stupid and tempt fate.
It’s just not a smart thing to do. Smart minds are a peculiar animal.
And it was smart minds that came up with the idea of Snapchat. But just as the smart minds that came up with it made a go of it, other smart minds went to work undermining it.
There are dozens of apps in the App Store and Google Play that allow you to easily save incoming photos and videos without the other person knowing.
SaveSnap, one of the more popular Snapchat-saving apps, will warn you before you save images that you are violating the other user’s privacy, but it doesn’t stop you from saving them anyway.
Then there is the claim on 4Chan that Snapchat has been hacked. Has it? We’ll find out tomorrow, when the images are supposed to be released. If this reflected a hole in the program that could be exploited by hackers, a white hat hacker would have found it and told Snapchat, without disclosing the contents unless Snapchat denied it, and then only to make the point. But smart minds can wear black hats too.
Is it wrong to reveal the private images people post on Snapchat? Of course it is, and if it turns out that this was a black hat hack, it may well constitute a crime of unauthorized access under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
Yet, the trust reposed by silly people who feel compelled to take sexually explicit pics of themselves because this is the sort of thing they need to send to others, combined with their naïve trust in the promise of technology to safeguard them from bad things happening, has been violated over and over. When the hell are people going to get the message that they should not rest their fate on the promise of technology to protect them?
Whining about the misery of this breach of trust after the fact isn’t going to make poor choices disappear. Screaming about your right to pathos, your entitlement to do as you please without anyone or anything harshing the joy you feel at behaving like a bratty child, won’t make people unsee those horribly embarrassing things they were never meant to see.
This is the fallacy being promoted, both by those who adore technology too much and by those whose self-absorbed grasp of entitlement is too flimsy to admit that they are promoting wildly foolish ideas. The tech may be fun, cool and novel, but it isn’t foolproof. There are plenty of smart people who know how to craft tech solutions, and plenty of smart people who know how to exploit their flaws.
Get this through your heads already: there is no guarantee in a silicon chip. It’s just a thing, to be used or abused as the binary gods allow. It doesn’t hate you, but it doesn’t love you either. It’s just a thing, no matter how hard people try to personify technology to make it feel more warm and fuzzy to you in the hope that you will pay more money to make it your new BFF.
And for those who desperately try to skate past the stupid stuff people, particularly young people who have yet to realize the many miseries that can befall them from a moment of carelessness, because the emotional appeal of free-wheeling, self-indulgent entitlement is a far easier sell than the intellectual appeal of not being a monumental bonehead, you are contributing to the harm of the very people you claim to want to save.
Stop pretending you have clean hands in this ongoing mess, when your encouragement of poor choices does nothing to help your beloved victims. Stop telling them that they have a right to be foolish, and are entitled to do so without any fear of consequences.
Life has consequences that are deserved and undeserved, and anyone whose image from Snapchat is revealed does not deserve to be victimized by the blackhat revelation. Will it make them feel better to know that there was someone worse than them out there wreaking havoc with their lives? Is that sufficient comfort? Or would they prefer not to have their sexually explicit images revealed at all?
Neither the features nor the flaws of technology are going to be changed by hand-wringing or, sorry to say, law. While the latter has the potential to add another layer of misery atop the stupidity of blind faith, it won’t fix the problem. It’s time to grow up about technology, enjoy its benefits while understanding the risks. This will continue to be difficult while choirs of angels sing about how in their perfect world, foolish choices have no consequences. In the tech world, they have very real consequences.
Discover more from Simple Justice
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
I wouldn’t characterize it as technology’s promise, so much as an empty promise of the snapchat founder.
As noted security expert Bruce Schneier explained way back in 2001:
Snapchat’s immediate response to this kerfuffle makes it painfully clear they were aware they were selling digital snake oil:
Yes, the fine print has always said that it may not work, may cause seizures or death, etc. But, unlike most of the drugs on TV that presumably work for at least a few people, it was never remotely possible for snapchat to control what the recipient of your picture does with it.
Then you would be myopic and foolish. This isn’t a “snapchat” issue. Snapchat is just todays flavor, and your lack of the foresight to understand makes comments like yours part of the problem of making people stupider.
> Then you would be myopic and foolish.
I’ll cop to the myopia, and let others decide on foolish for themselves.
> This isn’t a “snapchat” issue. Snapchat is just todays flavor
I agree completely with your broader point, but feel that snapchat is a poor vehicle for illustration. People and technology fail, but snapchat deliberately, actively misled its customers over a long period of time.
> your lack of the foresight to understand makes comments like yours part of the problem of making people stupider.
As you make abundantly clear, there are certainly unknown unknowns with technology that will bite us, and we should be vigilant, because there will always be bad technology. But there will also always be bad actors, and we shouldn’t give the bad actors a pass simply because they were using bad technology. The mischaracterization of snapchat’s failure as a technical one does us as no more favors than the mischaracterization of Madoff as a stockbroker.
You agree with the broader point, but want to nitpick the details. Great.
Press release from NeoJacobin Software, Inc.:
Mankind’s yet in chains, though born free.
There’s a fix for that — technology!
Want to make risk-free forays?
O tempora! O mores!
Buy our apps! You can go on a spree!
SHG: As Partick Maupin noted, the fact that Snapchat actively misled its customers does not invalidate your larger point. At the same time, I do not see how you can simply dismiss this as a detail, and charge him with nitpicking. I am with him on this issue.
1. Because Snapchat is used here only as an example. Last time, it was the iCloud. I realize that some people get caught up in the details, and they are free to focus on the nuance of the specific situation if that’s their purpose. Just not on my soapbox.
2. By doing so, it undermines the larger point, detracts from it, confuses it, and tends to take those people who are easily sidetracked off the point and down into a separate rabbit hole. Now you may well believe it should go there, and that’s fine. Just not here.
3. How many people, do you supposed, who read this post wondered, “but what does Lawrence think, and does he agree with Patrick?” I know I didn’t.
Not sure I agree.
Ultimately, the society that can fairly and maturally deal with the ability of data mining to connect information about you with you and (absent serious genetic engineering) the unavoidable desire of people to do weird kinky, embarrassing etc.. stuff in private isn’t one we are close to having.
Right now we are a schizophrenic society that in some sense recognizes that everyone does weird shit in private but nevertheless drastically punishes those that simply happen to have that conduct caught on record. Pathologically, we both elevate breaking loose, having fun, etc.. and feel that someone who never went on college spring break, never once flashed their tits at some guy in a moment of exhibitionistic (perhaps intoxicated) silliness, photocopied their ass etc.. is stuck up and missing an important part of life. Yet, for some reason we still deny those people who happen to have their pic snapped at Mardi Gras flashing tits supreme court posts, presidencies, hell even fairly normal jobs we would otherwise give them even though we factually know that it was simply bad luck they got caught and your other candidates have kept their private stupid shit private.
A more desirable culture that can both snicker in private when it finds evidence of applicants/candidates for a job having behaved in silly private behavior but also draw a line between private in public is truly possible. It is essentially the culture that all small or overcrowded (or both) towns must have. The most extreme example is the dutch who (perhaps because the land won’t support skyskrapers) essentially live in very packed small towns even in their large cities and, as a result, have developed a social respect for other individuals private silly behavior. You kind of have to do so when you can hear your neighbor (sorry to be crass) take a dump through the wall and surely parse every word of their marital argument, find out when they have love etc.. While I don’t know that they do I bet the dutch like all other people gossip about it and get drunk and tell funny stories about shit they heard a neighbor do once…yet they nevertheless seem to have a strong prohibition against holding this kind of behavior against people (or even judging it as newsworthy). Maybe the best US society can manage is french style consumption of gossip about elites while still being willing to elect or promote people with wacky private lives.
Either way, I feel the fact that even in our digital age most people do lots of silly stuff and happen to get away without any pics of it being associated with them is perpetuating a great harm on the unfortunate minority who now gets caught (someone who won’t take it down does snap that pic in public). As long as most people can assure themselves that their personal silliness/pecadillos are safely under wraps they won’t feel the important “that could be me” reaction when dealing with people whose pecadilos get out.
As a result, while the particular facts here require me to think the 4chan release is harmful and immoral ….though I surely would if it was pics of senators congressmen etc.. being stupid when they were in their teens….. in general there is a huge societal value in making sure everyone feels the heat on this issue. I want to make sure everyone realizes they have a digital neighbor and digital walls are always thing because only then will the way we treat people whose neighbor is a dick and publishes the info better.
But targeting the weak and stupid is not a good way to do it. Hacking the rich and successful (nude photo leack from apple) has had quite positive social effects. It used to be really damning to have sexting pictures leaked…now most women can be slightly reassured by the fact that younger generations really aren’t judgemental about this issue (doesn’t mean they won’t be mean to each other by preying on our fear of being judged negatively for them until it’s clear that no one thinks it’s a big deal).
Technology is binary. It doesn’t distinguish between the people you want to harm and the people you want to protect. If one can be targeted, so can the other. It’s cavalier to think you can impose your vision of positive social effects on the tool.
Privacy affects each person individually. Macrocosmic visions of societal value do nothing to address the individual harms suffered by those who aren’t deserving (in your view) of being revealed. Don’t be so cavalier about the harms suffered by others. Their privacy isn’t yours to give away.