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April 18, 2013

Snapchat Uploads Millions of Pictures a Day, Then Deletes Them Almost Instantly

By Peter B. Counter, TMCnet Contributing Writer

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then the average user of Snapchat speaks a million miles a minute. Among Instagram’s leading competitors, Snapchat treats its users’ content like spoken words: There one moment, gone the next. A picture taken on Snapchat only lasts for ten seconds and is then deleted, saved only in the mind of its recipient.



According to Evan Spiegel, speaking for Snapchat in New York at the All Things D: Dive into Mobile conference, Snapchat users upload 150 million photos to the mobile service per day. That number is over three times the reported daily content of Instagram. The difference, of course, is that an Instagram lasts forever, and ten seconds is not a very long time to spend with an image on your phone. This leaves open the question: Just exactly what good is a ten second picture?

The quick answer is self-portraits. You know, those pictures that litter Instagram, Facebook and Twitter (News - Alert) feeds otherwise know as “selfies.” Evan Spiegel says Snapchat gets a lot of those. Critics of the service worry that Snapchat enables teen “sexting,” since the short shelf life minimizes the stakes of sending a racy photo from phone to phone.

This is not the designed purpose of the app. Snapchat has a notification that is sent to the photographer if an image has been subject to a screen shot: an implementation meant to encourage community generated rules so that behavior can self-regulate. It is, after all, up to the users how the photos are used. Snapchat makes sure of this since after the image has been marked as viewed its internal servers delete the content and null the field, scrubbing all traces of self-portrait, nude or not, from the app, making the sort of Instagram sleuthing that is done by law enforcers impossible.

Once again, as far as issues of "sexting" go, the ownness is on the parent of a teen to make sure they know how their offspring uses their technology with social programs like uKnowKids, which can help parents find strategies to monitor the new high-tech habits of their children and protect them from the dangers an app like this may expose them to.




Edited by Jamie Epstein
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