Hacker News Reader

Comment by carc | Hacker News Reader

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...

View on HN

> 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!

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

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com