Snapchat’s new ‘scary’ privacy policy | Hacker News Reader

Snapchat’s new ‘scary’ privacy policy

marketwatch.com

112 pointsShivetya54 comments

“You grant Snapchat a world-wide, 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 and in any and all media or distribution methods”

This exact language shows up in almost every ToS, and every six months or so a dumb news story blows up because someone who isn't a lawyer reads it and gets angry.

I'm not a lawyer either, but I'm going to try to translate it anyway:

"You grant Snapchat a world-wide, perpetual, royalty-free, sublicensable, and transferable license" - you agree that when you upload something to Snapchat you can't turn round later and claim they owe you money for doing so.

"to host, store, use, display, reproduce" = to store the data that you upload and show it back to you (or to other people, presumably based on the semantics of how sharing works within the application)

"modify, adapt, edit, publish, create derivative works from" = create thumbnails. Provide you with an editing interface. Update records in a database relating to the content you uploaded. Build features akin to retweeting on Twitter or resharing or tools that let you add mustaches to your photos or whatever.

"publicly perform, broadcast, distribute, syndicate, promote, exhibit and publicly display that content" = show your content to other people (again, based on the semantics of how those features work in the app).

"in any form and in any and all media or distribution methods" = again, thumbnails, format conversions etc. If someone invents a new media or distribution method, Snapchat should be allowed to build it into their applications without getting you to re-approve the ToS.

I think the fundamental problem here is that ToS need to be written to be as generic as possible. If Snapchat wrote a ToS that legally bound them to the exact way that their app works today, they would have to get a lawyer involved with literally every feature change they make (or feature experiment they run) in the future.

This is great, and maybe every ToS should have a plain English version next to it?

Shopify does this wonderfully: https://www.shopify.com/legal/terms

This is what https://tosdr.org is trying to do

but it still can have the other meaning. one does not exclude the other

"they would have to get a lawyer involved with literally every feature change they make (or feature experiment they run) in the future."

Sorry, but I don't see that as a bad thing. Impractical and costly? Maybe. People are on the hook for what they sign up for, so as long as they keep letting this stuff go, they shouldn't be surprised when it goes bad for them.

Great, so they have the best of intentions but what happens when they go broke and their data is sold off, the new owners have no obligation to the old users they just own all the pictures and could do whatever they want with it.

Additionally who is to say that they don't decide down the line that using user pics for profit is fine and something they want to do. How often do we saw laws enacted for what appears to be good reason and then used for other purposes. Why do we think a for profit company would be better at this sort of thing than a government?

The very next sentence which the article doesn't bother mentioning limits the scope of Snapchat's rights under this worldwide perpetual blah blah grant.

This exact language shows up in almost every ToS

But almost every TOS is not written for a service whose primary marketing feature is privacy and in particular the transient nature of the communications it sends.

The kind of generalised boilerplate you talk about makes sense, at least up to a point, for hosting services or social networks, places like Pinterest or YouTube or Facebook. Even then they are often written more broadly than they need to be to provide the service with reasonable legal security, and this is something that should be challenged IMHO. But for a service like SnapChat, this seems wildly inappropriate and, in particular, unexpected.

The very reason most people use snapchat in the first place is that they expect a very limited featureset with tight controls.

It rightly should be a cause for concern that they're making way for expanding the scope of the service.

Quoted from article:

This is what it takes for the company to start monetizing seriously. I certainly expected it. Facebook did this like 20 times.

Maybe they're lining up their TOS to be acquired by FB.

I think they're past that point. Lining up their TOS to go public.

How are they past that point? I doubt if they're all that close to an IPO in the sense that they haven't really proved any sort of monetization that can come even close to justifying even a billion dollar valuation. If they got an offer from FB I have to think they think long and hard about taking it.

Stupid question: who's going to invest in it? Don't these social network sites lacking real profit? Are more people going to dump money on it because they hear the kids talk about snapchat?

Who knows, good old Microsoft may want to put more cash down than FB or others on an app that gave then a legit piece of millennial mobile activity.

Snapchat already turned down two offers from Facebook. Maybe a third will be the charm.

For a platform that promised an empty promise of privacy, that change seems particularly onerous.

The mistake is to assume that their main differentiator is secrecy or privacy. It isn't. It's convenience, immediacy, ephemerality and its effect on how you communicate, and one-to-one direct visual communication—in that order, in combination. It's the experience, not the immaterial promises they make.

Privacy was always an empty promise, and it never mattered to the vast majority of their users.

Ephemerality doesn't truly exist without secrecy and privacy in this case. It's one reason I don't use snapchat, because the "experience" is misleading.

It does, in fact, exist. The experience of ephemerality is all that's necessary, and the experience is that you take a photo, it exists for 10 seconds for all intents and purposes users care about, and then disappears. Disappears here means that I, my friends, and people I care about ever see it again. They don't, I don't, so I'm happy.

Remember, you are not their target market. Their target market is 2% people like you (nerds concerned about privacy and indirect/intangible principles) and 98% people who just want the experience.

I still think those 98% would be upset to know that someone somewhere still has access to those photos. It would certainly change the behavior of a huge chunk of them w.r.t. the service.

Snapchat hasn't promised privacy since the FTC told them to stop last year.

Completely agree. It seems that some people tend to think that each time a new social network emerges there is going to be some moment where suddenly the terms are going to change completely in favor of the user. These new terms are no different than any other terms of service I have read for a social network.

You can find almost a word-for-word copy of this text in the LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, and I could probably go on, but those are only the ones I verified the wording on. IANAL, but I would agree that without this line it would be very difficult from a legal perspective to monetize the site alongside the user content.

> These new terms are no different than any other terms of service I have read for a social network.

Snapchat's selling point is that the messages/images are deleted after the recipients have seen them - this isn't the case for other social networks.

Snapchat's promotional material even encourages screenshotting etc

"You choose what to keep" is their selling point

From Snapchat's privacy policy,

"Snapchat captures what it’s like to live in the moment. So in many cases the messages sent through our services are automatically deleted from our servers once we detect that they have been viewed or have expired. And again in most cases, the services are programmed to delete a message from the recipient’s device once it’s been viewed or expired as well.

There are some exceptions though to this rule. Some of our services, such as My Story, Replay, and Live, allow users to interact with the messages and content you provide through the services for a longer period of time. That means those messages and content may be available on our servers and a recipient’s device after they’ve been viewed or expired. For example, if you add a Snap to My Story, other users will be able to view it for roughly 24 hours. And because Snaps submitted to Live and other crowd-sourced Stories are inherently public and chronicle matters of public interest, we may save them indefinitely and allow them to be viewed again through any of our services or third-party sources."

It seems like they've put in the new language so they can try to monetize their Live service, which should be expected (and users already give implicit permission to the company by sending a snap to them to display publicly). Otherwise personal message stay personal, as far as their privacy policy is concerned. I'm no legal expert, but surely they can't (legally) lie to their users about this, right?

It seems like we go through this same story for every social network: company changes its TOS, people jump to the worst possible conclusion, company clarifies, people find something new to overreact to.

There is no privacy when posting something to the internet.

Why is this downvoted?

By default, this is the only privacy strategy which makes sense anywhere on the internet, for the average user of large scale services.

Whenever you post anything, anywhere, but particularly on any kind of public forum or social network, assume it'll be seen by your current and future coworkers and grandmother. Assume it'll be the post/photo/video used to identify you on the news if you're ever in the news for anything.

If it's still ok, post away. If it's not, consider why you're sharing it on a social network anyway, and if it's still important to share with a select group of people, then consider sharing it by some other means.

>Why is this downvoted?

I didn't down vote it, but...

Not everyone is technologically savvy. Snapchat became popular because of the implication that the pictures you take with it are ephemeral and private. It's sort of the whole point, isn't it? If not, how is it different than a SMS picture message?

Sure, to those who understand the tech, it's pretty obvious that whatever is sent through the pipes is out there, in perpetuity. But most people don't think like that, and Snapchat played on that misconception as a model.

All the more reason to share and teach the mantra.

It might be construed as unethical, but it's also a case of adverse selection, which for what it's worth is instrumental to a large class of business models, and especially in the digital age. Much of it is software's intrinsic ability at providing external uniformity even in the case of internally unsound design, coupled with withholding of source (primary auditable information) as essential to business.

It's not just Snapchat. Lots of software targeted towards programmers, sysadmins and power users relies on similar smoke-and-mirrors branding that tries to hide as much technical details as possible in favor of presenting grand high-level summaries that present it as a solution to an imminent problem. Either way, the assumption is you won't screen them.

I didn't downvote it, but while it is a sound personal attitude, in this context it sounds too much like corporate whitewashing.

The problem with publicly assuming the cynical position as a response to news like these is that, perversely, it removes any disincentives to actually doing it.

>> There is no privacy when posting something to the internet.

> Why is this downvoted?

I agree with it, but that sentence doesn't add anything interesting to the discussion of this article. It also has a pretty decent chance of starting an even less interesting sequence of "no, I disagree," "no, I agree," "no, I disagree,"... replies.

I think the crux of it is that people don't expect Snapchats to become public. They expect them to be more like text messages where there's an expectation of privacy. When a user posts on Facebook, there's an expectation that the content is out there for people to see. If you post a public video on YouTube, you expect people to see it. If you uploaded a video on YouTube, there's an expectation that the local news might show it. But no one expects the local news to show an embarrassing Snapchat you sent to your friends.

But even Facebook's TOS is a lot kinder. "This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it." Most people don't re-share photos. They comment and tag them, but if you delete the photo, Facebook's license to it ends. They can't then give that photo to a news paper because they no longer have a license to it.

Similarly, YouTube's TOS has a similar provision. "The above licenses granted by you in video Content you submit to the Service terminate within a commercially reasonable time after you remove or delete your videos from the Service." If you delete content from YouTube, they're license to the content terminates within a commercially reasonable time after you delete it.

So, both Facebook and YouTube let you terminate the content license even though there's a better assumption about the content being public. People have been using Snapchat assuming they can't be made public if they ran for Congress or something. In fact, while people might have seen stupid YouTube or Facebook posts from them, if they only retained a bookmark and didn't save a copy, they could delete those embarrassing moments before their run and terminate that license. In fact, because receiving users see Snapchat as ephemeral, they're much more likely to save a copy of the image using a screenshot than Facebook users are. Facebook/YouTube users often assume that the content they see will be there in perpetuity.

Time after time Snapchat has shown it doesn't respect user privacy or security. Now that this updated ToS is probably written to simply support their new features, their historically amateurish attitude toward privacy will come back and bite them. At times, I think Snapchat is worse than Facebook on privacy. Yet, people don't seem to care. So users deserve the risks that Snapchat brings. I'm done trying to point out how bad Snapchat is when others, like Wickr, are so much better.

I don't understand... Snapchat's ToS has always said this. They have right to access and profit off any of your content, but it remains the case that they maintain the privacy level of that content. If you send a snap (non-story), Snapchat has the right to do anything with it, so long as they do not violate the privacy level (they can only show it to the people you sent it to).

And of course they have the right as employees, to look at any piece of content.

Here are the updated terms of service, if anyone wants to see them directly: https://www.snapchat.com/terms

And Snapchat's privacy policy: https://www.snapchat.com/privacy

Quotes are wrong. Should be:

   Snapchat's 'new' scary privacy policy.

I know of people who would lose their jobs if some of their stuff went public. I don't think that's what it's for though.

This seems to be more fodder for the insatiable targeted-ad/law enforcement data crunching monster.

It seems most large online services plod inexorably towards terms like these, no matter their original starting position or principles.

The most delusional bit of the ToS:

By using the Services, you agree that: [...] You will not post content that contains pornography,...

If you don't want that on your service Snapchat, you should shut down shop today.

By uploading your content to some private corporation, you might be giving them the right to do whatever they want with it? Big surprise there!

Start using Signal - the real privacy app.

Is it a scary policy? Most have that paragraph verbatim to ensure they're able to use your content.

I don't use or know anything about Snapchat, but the article makes it sound like this update to the policy is a complete 180 on one of the service's major selling points. That is indeed scary.

> Most have that paragraph verbatim to ensure they're able to use your content.

The difference is the others don't market themselves as a private and ephemeral messaging service.

Yes, it is a scary policy for a product that billed itself as a platform to send self-destructing messages. Snapchat has always lied and the fact that you can pay to watch a snap again proves that the snaps do not go away after the last recipient has viewed the snap. Of course, this is a violation of trust.

And they lie to this day:

> Please note: even though Snaps, Chats, and Stories are deleted from our servers after they expire, we cannot prevent recipient(s) from capturing and saving the message by taking a screenshot or using an image capture device.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.snapchat.a...

How is it lying to admit that you can capture the image?

The deletion--not the screenshot bit--may be a lie.

Ah, ok. But no one knows if they have stored any images. They have simply updated their terms in order to not get sued if they choose to do so. As long as they say that they're deleting photos from their servers there's no reason to believe they're not.

> As long as they say that they're deleting photos from their servers there's no reason to believe they're not.

There is no reason to believe they will delete any snap before all recipients have viewed it once, or according to new policy, have viewed it once and paid 33¢ to replay it once (I'd imagine this could update to n times where n is a number they decide in the future).

Imagine being able to use people's snaps for advertising online. Use a photo of someone you watch a lot and put a picture of them smiling or a video of them saying "I love you" (thanks to voice and or face recognition) in a targeted advertisement... I believe Facebook tried something similar a while back.

scary privacy policies just mean you share less stuff ?

Is there any other uses of snapchat outside sending nude photos?

Is it possible for Google to create a ToS that grants them all ownership of email you send?

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