It’s not been a good past couple of days for Snapchat or their users. Approximately 200,000 photos which users thought had been deleted have reportedly been put online by hackers, some of them believed to have been of nude underage children, since half of Snapchat’s users are between the ages of 13 and 17. It’s believed the hackers had been collecting the photos since 2011. They allegedly leaked the photos to 4Chan – the same site where images of nude celebrities appeared. The Snapchat images have allegedly now been taken down, but the hackers have threatened to leak more photos.
If you know next-to-nothing about Snapchat, it’s an app that lets you send short video and photo messages that delete within a few seconds of sending them. (At least that’s how it’s supposed to work…) As we all know by now though, nothing is ever “deleted’ forever. It’s believed the leaks came from the use of a third-party app which allowed users to save the deleted photos, and Snapsaved.com has allegedly taken responsibility for hacking the photos.
Snapchat has been very vocal about the fact that this leak is not their fault, stating,
“Snapchatters were victimised by their use of third-party apps to send and receive Snaps, a practice that we expressly prohibit in our Terms of Use precisely because they compromise our users’ security…We vigilantly monitor the App Store and Google Play for illegal third-party apps and have succeeded in getting many of these removed.”
What do you think? Do they share in some of the responsibility? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below. And, please remember to use extreme caution before putting anything personal out there for the online world to see.
[Image via imore]
SOURCE: BBC