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Comment by shawabawa3 | Hacker News Reader

All the crypto stuff he suggests is absolutely stupid.

The fundamental concept of snapchat is impossible. It's the same problem as DRM. You can't control how somebody views some content because as long as they can see it, they can copy it (even if they magically fixed all screenshot and 3rd party app issues, you could always take a picture of the phone screen)

Doing all that crypto stuff is the equivalent of using 6 locks on your bikes wheel. No matter how good the locks are, it's still going to get stolen by removing the wheel.

Them not removing the images client side is a bit bad, yes, but 99% of people who could recover images like that could recover them 101 other ways

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It's not impossible or stupid. His crypto proposal is to protect you from (or at least limit) the impact of any malicious action by Snapchat or anyone they may turn images over to (the police for example). I'm sure that isn't the biggest concern for Snapchat users, but it's still a worthwhile precaution.

Of course, for a company valued at billions (hah!), implementing anything that can get them in to hot water with the authorities, or breaks the user experience, isn't going to happen just before or after an IPO or buyout.

> is crypto proposal is to protect you from (or at least limit) the impact of any malicious action by Snapchat

but...his proposal involves trusting snapchat... so it's completely useless.

Even if they did implement all of it, at any point they could update a backdoor into it and you would have no way of knowing.

It's essentially the same problem as javascript crypto[1]

  [1] http://www.matasano.com/articles/javascript-cryptography/

Not really, his crypto propsal doesn't protect you from any malicious action by Snapchat, and thus they is pretty much useless. You either trust Snapchat or don't. Having Snapchat create for you private keys and thinking that now your data is more private is naive

Right, but everything clientside can be audited. Especially on Android where decompiling apps practically gives you source code.

I don't agree with this argument. To me, it sounds a lot like the one that was used for a long time to justify Chrome showing stored passwords in plaintext without prompting for a password: "the only strong permission boundary for your password storage is the OS user account".

While in theory yes, a system is only as secure as its weakest component, this completely misses the point that what we're trying to prevent here is casual spying and that the person receiving the content is not always the one you want to guard against. True, if you don't trust the one you're sending pictures to there is nothing you can do, but that's not a reason to make all other types of spying effortlessly easy.

Because users believe (whether they're right to do so is beside the point; fact is, they do) their messages disappear from the target device, they might be compelled to send photos that are a bit more private in nature than those they'd usually send through other channels. Most often, what you want to prevent is curious third parties ("friends", jealous boyfriends or girlfriends, the police) who somehow got access of your phone from easily accessing all the pictures you've ever received after the fact, and properly deleting images after reception (which I believe they now do, as this issue has been known for a long time now) would actually achieve just that.

Not removing the client side images is not the bad bit. It's the marketing blurb that claimed they did exactly that.

A startup misrepresenting their capabilities and not really caring about user privacy or security?

Shocking.

Exactly. My brother in law RE Snapchat to save all images it reads to his SD card. It took all of 10 minutes.

Even if they could lock down the phone and successfully implement a DRM I could just take a dang picture of the picture....

Removing the image client side is the whole point of this application. It's not just "a bit bad", in my opinion it's entirely dishonest.

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