Snapchat’s Non-Vanishing Message: You Can Trust Us | Hacker News Reader

Snapchat’s Non-Vanishing Message: You Can Trust Us

medium.com

25 pointssteven9 comments

>Snapchat also benefits from a close relationship with Google, which hosts Snapchat’s operations on its cloud. Snapchat is now the biggest customer of Google App Engine, and will be for the foreseeable future.

That's interesting, I wasn't aware of that.

TFA seemed to have a particularly obsequious and credulous tone, so I clicked the next thing by Levy, which is about a new Steve Jobs book, and also seemed to have that tone. Is this just a way for companies to have Levy write their press releases and post them at a non-company location? Who pays for these pieces?

Levy apparently has lots of connections and tends to write sympathetic accounts relying on inside access to companies. Explaining how insiders think is a useful form of reporting. If you want an outside view, go with someone else.

The Xposed Framework (http://repo.xposed.info/) allows you to hook arbitrary Android functions. And APKs are pretty trivial to modify, though they can't be re-signed. Not sure if it's possible for Snapchat to prevent TOS violations, seeing as they need to put the pixels on your screen somehow.

I used Snapchat only briefly because it's horrible, but people enjoy continued success in saving dick pics etc. with the Keepchat Xposed module in current Snapchat versions.

What bothers me more is there is no encryption from end-to-end. If i snap someone they're always going to be able to photograph their phone, if nothing else, but Snapchat aren't even trying to build trust wrt snaps in transit. If you look at the crypto they have deployed, it's nothing more obfuscation to prevent reverse-engineering. They treat the whole thing as a joke.

In the end, they have a 15 billion dollar valuation. Until the concept of encryption enters the mass consumer consciousness or a horrifically damaging event occurs, they don't need to improve their encryption model to accomplish their company agenda.

Wait. Hasn't the concept of encryption entered mass consumer consciousness (my grandparents have asked me about it) and have not horrifically damaging events occurred?

Consumers know what encryption is but they don't demand it in their products and it does not drive their decision making on consumption preferences.

Horrifically damaging events have occurred in isolation. The celebrity photo leaks a little while back is a good example. The blame for those leaks wasn't pushed onto Apple and the celebrities security practices, it was placed on the individuals who obtained the pictures. We need more widespread damage with a clear link to lack of encryption. The target breach last year(?) is a good example of a similar event for data security and has led to some political talk about laws with stricter requirements.

This non-story is missing the point of Snapchat completely.

Actual snapchat users don't care if their snaps are securely vaporized for all time. This isn't top-secret data that's being sent over the wire, it's selfies and food and drunken antics and bad jokes. They just don't want to deal with the social baggage of having them all easily viewed by Grandma and that weird kid from high school.

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