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Comment by ambicapter | Hacker News Reader

Yes, but you know snapchat pictures aren't really deleted right? 'Temporary pictures' is a proposition that doesn't actually exist in the digital realm, and certainly not when a VC-backed company is proposing it.

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I noticed several replies talking about Snapchat's practices, but no one commented on the huge number of applications that exist to download Snapchat content permanently and without triggering Snapchat's screenshot detection. It's not like these require any technical ability either: they are listed even in the iTunes Store and are very simple to use.

I'm not a parent, but if I had a child in the Snapchat age range I would show them how easy it is to make the impermanent permanent and that trust is placed on people, not technology. Untrustworthy people cannot be made trustworthy through technology.

In a way Snapchat is trying to be like DRM, and we all know how well that generally works.

Yes, they really are.

Read the "Message Deletion and Retention" section: https://www.snapchat.com/privacy

As a thought experiment, if you were the head of ISIS or the Russian ambassador in Washington DC, would you or would you not expect your snaps to be "really deleted" aka actually private? Honest question, not trolling.

Snapchat won't protect you from a state-level adversary, nor does it need to. It may, however, protect you from a disgruntled ex leaking your photos, or from an employer snooping on your private life. It may even protect you from yourself when you come across an old post you really didn't need to see.

Snapchat attempts to use technology to enforce the social contract of "please don't repeat everything I say to everyone you know, and don't hoard it indefinitely", which is established protocol for, say, actual in-person conversations. By implementing a casual form of endpoint security, a non-sophisticated actor at the receiving end may not break this social contract without repercussions, since nominally, only the official client can get the payload; the official client deletes the payload upon receipt, and if the official client detects that a screenshot was taken or the message was saved, it notifies the sender. That's the feature, not off-the-record messaging.

I would expect that if I were personally targeted by ie NSA, they could intercept the snaps in transit, and those copies would not be deleted. Short of that though, I certainly do believe that snaps are indeed completely deleted after they are viewed (unless the recipient makes a screenshot) because the risk to Snapchat of lying about that far, far outweighs any potential reward.

I would expect them to take a picture of their phone with the picture I send them with another camera and arhive them for security reasons.

Oh come on, every phone can take a screenshot. Once you send a picture out - it's forever on the internet. That nude picture will end up in 4chan, 9gag, other teen image posting websites, then a dozen creepy guys will save them and share their collection...

Agree. Oh, and it will be also be used to generate other nudes - people create fake accounts, send the nudes as if they were theirs, and incite the other person to send nudes of their own.

Instead, hold volume-down + power in your Android device.

Compared to facebook they go away and it's more a "Probably" goes away.

I'm sure there will be a few snapchat users that will get screwed by this but at least the majority of the use will vanish before these kids are old enough for jobs and the shit they did on snapchat doesn't show up in a background check.

The article clearly states how you can take a screenshot of a snap, thus saving it forever. That has always been an issue.

Stop pretending you know what you're talking about. Do you know how much money is saved by not keeping those pictures? Snapchat handles more pictures per day than facebook[0], which gets almost half a billion per day. I know a few snapchat engineers that concur that Snapchat really does not keep any pictures, which allows them to make interesting optimizations that Facebook (and similar) can't.

[0] http://techcrunch.com/2013/11/19/snapchat-reportedly-sees-mo...

How in the world does that work? I'm too old to have caught that wave, but I have a younger sister, and it's not like the snaps her friends send her go poof into the ether if her phone isn't on the network when they are sent. They've got to get queued up in storage on a server somewhere, they've got to get sent to her phone, and I assume, checksummed to make sure they didn't get corrupted in delivery, possibly resent?

I mean, I hope SnapChat isn't keeping photos, or else they'd be sitting on one of the largest collections of child porn in the world...

You're right, I could've been more specific - they definitely need to sit somewhere if the destination phone isn't on the network or something, but they are deleted once viewed or some timeout has been reached. This of course also doesn't consider ways that the destination phone could store the photo (screen shot or something). But as far as snapchat is concerned, it's gone.

Well, the delete action doesn't happen until they've been viewed. The original comment was suggesting that delete-means-soft-delete-not-destroy, not that the photos are never stored at all.

Please let's stop equating naked children to child porn. That only helps the status quo which is willing and able to destroy the life of innocent people

> Stop pretending you know what you're talking about.

Calm down.

> Do you know how much money is saved by not keeping those pictures?

Okay, fine. Even if the pictures aren't stored indefinitely (I'd assume they'd do batch deletions at the end of the day or something when latency isn't as important), all of the photos are encrypted with the same symmetric key which can be found in any Snapchat binary. Which means that they aren't any more private than sending unencrypted images.

Why aren't they encrypting end-to-end with private keys on the devices?

Because teenagers don't understand/care about that.

An idea that a couple of friends (can't remember if cyphar was one of them) and I came up with: piggyback some actual crypto on top of Snapchat, using steganography to initially transmit public keys. Would be interesting to see this happen.

I think I was there. Can't remember though. The issue is that Snapchat has gotten more stringent about image formats and things (remember when bad crypto could cause the app to crash?).

Because they don't do crypto properly. Some friends of mine broke Snapchat quite badly a few years ago (one of them goes through HN, so he might read this). The tl;dr is that you shouldn't trust any aspect of your security to proprietary services. Especially ones that don't do crypto properly.

According to https://www.snapchat.com/static_files/lawenforcement.pdf, Snapchat still stores a record of who you've snapped, and that information can be retrieved by courts/etc.

> Stop pretending you know what you're talking about.

Whoa, that's totally out of line here. Please post civilly and substantively, or not at all.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Your comment would be fine without the first sentence (and maybe the second).

I just wanted to say it's really nice to see this type of moderation. I'm much more in favor of corrective action than just removing comments.

Thanks for doing such good work!

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