While Snapchat itself wasn’t hacked, the peek-a-boo photo and video sharing site says customers using third-party app have allowed an estimated 200M nude photos to live on into eternity online. A hacker wishing to expose the security vulnerabilities of Snapchat is succeeding in its wakeup call.
First let’s get the basics down on Snapchat. The Snapchat app lets you share photos and videos of yourself.. but what makes it special.. why millions upon millions of people many of them very young use it, is that it claims that your photo will disappear within a peek-a-boo moment preventing the image – no matter how revealing- from being stored.
Here’s the problem.
Not only now are hackers are claiming to be in control of ten of thousands of nude photographs of snapchat users collected over months and months. But there are third party apps that have successfully been able to crack the expiration date on these photos and store them forever.
One such third-party app SnapSave and its similarly named website SnapSaved have the ability to capture and store photos and videos forever. They admit to being hacked where upwards of 200,000 photos and videos from its users who are largely located in the USA, Sweden and Norway were leaked. The operator of SnapSave has shut its site down after realizing the hack. Other popular apps to save photos from snapchat are snapgrab and snapbox.
What can parents to better control what their kids/teens are doing on their phones? (from low to medium to high reactions):
1) Low: Educate your kids to the wisdom that nothing is ever safe to upload online thinking it’s private or will self-destruct.
2) Medium: Remove Snapchat from kids’ devices.
3) High: mSpy app let’s parents see what kids are sending on snapchat but costs $40/mo. I think this is a viable, but extreme parent reaction.. if you use it, I would suggest open dialogue with your kids about it rather than loose trust with family by being sneaky about it.