Snapchat Attempts To Quell Rumors Regarding Storage Of Photos

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This weekend saw Snapchat’s new privacy policy update sparking a wave of suggestions that the company was indefinitely storing user photos, videos, and text messages.

Snapchat responds to the outcry

Snapchat’s popularity is primarily based on users “knowing” that their videos, photos, and chats disappear once they are viewed by the recipient. So, when the weekend saw suggestions to the contrary the Venice, California-based company aggressively moved to make it clear to customers what its new privacy policy really meant.

“The Snaps and Chats you send your friends remain as private today as they were before the update,” the statement said. However, the company did have to tell its users that it could do nothing about screenshots taken of texts and photos by the recipient of those messages.

“Our Privacy Policy continues to say — as it did before — that those messages are automatically deleted from our servers once we detect that they have been viewed or have expired.

The former policy said: “In most cases, once we detect that all recipients have viewed a message, we automatically delete it from our servers. Essentially delete was Snapchat’s default.

“Snapchat is not — and has never been — stockpiling your private snaps and chats,” the company continued.

Snapchat is being unfairly treated?

Snapshot will certainly be thinking that they were hard done by the rumors that began small and reached a near tsunami level as the Internet often does when bloggers, writers, and social media get involved. There is nearly no ambiguity in the new privacy policy when the company addressed what is uploaded to their servers, “When you do that, you retain whatever ownership rights in that content you had to begin with,” is laid out in the Terms of Service.

“You grant Snapchat a worldwide, perpetual, royalty-free, sublicensable, and transferable license to host, store, use, display, reproduce, modify, adapt, edit, publish, create derivative works from, publicly perform, broadcast, distribute, syndicate, promote, exhibit, and publicly display that content in any form,” the full term reads. It’s pretty clear that “host” and “store” were responsible for the rumors over the weekend.

Snapchat users “talk” with photos

Evan Spiegel the co-founder and CEO of Snapchat earlier in the company’s history addressed this phenomenon,

“Historically photographs have been used to save really important memories, major life moments, but today, with the advent of the mobile phone and the connected camera, pictures are being used for talking.

“Now photographs are really used for talking, that’s why people are taking and sending so many photos on Snapchat.”

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