Messages that quickly self-destruct could enhance the privacy of
online communication and make people feel freer to be spontaneous.
One essential aspect of privacy is the
ability to control how much we disclose to others. Unfortunately, we’ve lost
much of that control now that every photo, chat, or status update posted on a
social-media site can be stored in the cloud: even though we intended to share
that information with someone, we don’t necessarily want it to stay available,
out of context, forever. The weight of our digital pasts is emerging as the
central privacy challenge of our time.
But what if people could make their posts vanish
automatically—making social media more of an analogue to everyday conversations
that aren’t recorded for posterity? That’s the promise of services such as
Snapchat, a mobile-phone app whose popularity has increased dramatically during
the past year. Evan Speigel and Bobby Murphy, who met as undergrads at
Stanford, came up with the idea two years ago, around the time New York
congressman Anthony Weiner accidentally made racy photos of himself public on
Twitter and was forced to resign. Snapchat lets users take photos or short
videos and then decide how long they will be visible to the recipient. After 10
seconds or less, the images disappear forever. (Not for nothing is Snapchat’s
mascot a picture of a grinning ghost.
From the beginning, the service appealed to teenagers looking for
a more private way of sending each other sexy pictures. But “sexting” alone
can’t account for all 100 million photos and videos exchanged on Snapchat every
day. And Mark Zuckerberg must worry that Snapchat addresses some misgivings
people have about privacy on Facebook; in December, Facebook launched a Snapchat
copycat app called Poke.
What makes temporary social media so appealing? Snapchat’s
founders often remark that they wanted to give people a way to express
themselves through something besides the idealized self-portraits many feel
required to maintain on social-media sites. Snapchats might be more exciting to
send and receive than other social-media posts because they are ephemeral, but
they are also arguably a more natural way to communicate. Whereas Facebook and
Twitter record and store your every offhand observation and casual interaction,
interactions in temporary social media can be something like brief, in-person
conversations: you can speak your mind without worrying that what you say will
be part of your digital dossier forever.
Although Snapchat’s posture as the anti-Facebook is a large part
of its allure, eventually its founders will have to confront some of the same
privacy challenges that have vexed Facebook. Snapchat contains an obvious
technological vulnerability: images that were meant to vanish can still be
saved if the recipient uses a screen-capture feature to take a picture of the
message during the seconds it appears. (If the recipient does this, Snapchat
notifies the sender, but by then it’s too late to stop the image from being preserved
and shared.) Moreover, while Snapchat promises to erase photos from its
servers, the company’s privacy policy adds that it “cannot guarantee that
the message data will be deleted in every case.”
As soon as a racy Snapchat picture of a celebrity goes viral,
trust in the company could be eroded.
But regardless of the fate
of Snapchat in particular, the idea of temporary social media is important
because the ability to be candid and spontaneous—and to be that way with only
some people and not others—is the essence of friendship, individuality, and
creativity. Facebook and Twitter do make it possible for their members to wall
off posts from the wider world and share them only with trusted people in
certain circles. But since those posts still last forever, this capacity for
limited sharing is technologically insecure. To the degree that temporary social
networks increase our sense of control over the conditions of our personal
exposure, they represent a first step toward a more nuanced kind of digital connection—one
acknowledging that our desire to share can coexist with a desire for reticence,
privacy, and the possibility of a fresh start.
Source: MIT Technology Review
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