I take issue with this new generation of developers who seem to have no moral or ethical boundaries on the invasion of privacy.
The whole "viral/social marketing" trend is also to blame, in addition to the way that startup valuation puts so much emphasis on "traction" rather than the actual tech or even a viable business model!
I do too, but I'm beginning to become convinced that most people really don't care and really aren't bothered by it.
We've had numerous clients -- maybe most of them -- request or expect us to keep track of the passwords for their online accounts for them. Privacy erosions and violations by various businesses really haven't been that big of a deal outside of tech circles. Just an hour or so ago, while on an errand, an NPR guest was mentioning something similar, that her Facebook account had been compromised but it didn't change the way she used the service. It wasn't really anything more than a temporary inconvenience for her.
Earlier today, a client's personal Hotmail account was compromised. It was being used to spam people on his contacts list. We got in touch with him to give him the heads-up on it. His response was, "it's not a big deal, I don't really care about that, I'm not even going to change the password on it."
We had one business client that supposedly took security very seriously. Government funded and all that. They would routinely ask us to put new procedures and safeguards in place, only to then turn around and immediately try to work around them for convenience's sake.
This has been a tough thing to accept, but I really don't believe any more that most people care at all about privacy or security. What they mostly want is convenience.
And SnapChat is very convenient.
How relevant is find_friends to Snapchat now? Is it really needed? Are they getting that many users building relationships for it? Is it worth damaging Snapchats image?
This won't damage SnapChat's image. At least, not among most of their userbase.
They don't need to focus on fixing this or on coming up with a better response because this isn't important to enough people.
Also, the value of the company.