Sending photos as a form of a fun conversation is now the most trending way of communicating for almost all teenagers nowadays. One application that made it more possible is Snapchat, which enable users to take photos and add captions to it, before sending them to some chosen contacts on your list. The photos that were sent by the user can only be viewed by the receivers based on the time that was set by the sender and believed to be deleted after the time allotment. These photos are called as Snaps. All these things were enjoyable to use, until the time that Hundreds of Thousands of photos were reportedly leaked into the World Wide Web.
Photos that were leaked were estimated to be up to 200,000, which all came from users of Snapchat. These photos were believed to be deleted after sending and receiving it, but now it is reported that it have been leaked and shared with some chat forum sites. This makes the Snapchat users worried about the things they believed to be secure. This leakage of photos has been titled as “The Snappening”, making it more obvious as it was near the word Snap.
What makes it more intriguing is that half of Snap chat user’s are said to be ranging from ages of 13 and 17. As this was trendy to most teenagers, it is feared that the leaked photos could be used in child pornography. The photos that leaked were said to be first seen on an unreliable website which is viralpop.com, but it has already been closed.
Snapchat answered all the questions that have been raised about them being the one who should be responsible with the leakage. But they took a stand on saying that the servers they have been using were not hacked or breached so they should not be the one held responsible for this case. They said that this is due to third party applications that were used to send, receive and keep these photos. These third party applications were said to be clearly defined as one of the prohibited things to use in Snapchat but some insist to still use it. Snapchat also said that they have monitored these third party apps and did their best to remove it from Google and Apple Stores, but still some are hard to be found. This unexpected case only proves that not all things that were sent and received electronically will be deleted for good.