Advertising Marketing PR, Mobile

Snapchat’s Crisis Comms Include Blaming Users

snapchat-logoA few weeks ago there was a big kerfluffle when Snapchat user information, including photos and other “snaps” were accessed and exposed beyond the walled, self-destructing garden of the app itself. In the wake of the hack – there’s little better word for it – Snapchat took the odd position that users were mostly to blame since the hack took advantage of weaknesses in the API it made available to third party apps.

Now it has announced a change to how it handles third party apps, saying they will warn users they find are using such apps and tell them to stop using it and change their password.

That’s a surprising approach to take since the issue seems to be with weaknesses in the API Snapchat offers, and which these apps then build on. If Snapchat is going to offer an API that allows developers to build alternative apps for people to choose from then it would seem the responsibility is on them to make sure said API cannot be used for malicious purposes, or really anything that goes against the Snapchat terms of service or other agreements.

Perhaps Snapchat’s reluctance to completely dismantle or drastically alter their API, which would had significant downstream impacts on not just the developer ecosystem but also potentially on user behavior, are lessons learned from the ham-handed way Twitter handled their app developer relationships two or three years ago, relationships the company is only now working to repair. In that case Twitter made broad sweeping changes that drastically changed what apps could or couldn’t do, leaving many without a purpose for existing and severely debilitating the usefulness of others.

While there were certainly transparency images in what Twitter did – leaving it to outsiders to assume the moves were motivated by the desire to sell more ads in a controlled environment. Those may have been true to an extent and certainly Twitter’s moves since then have been more and more about rolling out new ad products and introducing environments that are conducive to more ads.

But Snapchat isn’t (at least in this instance) looking to sell more ads. Instead they’re faced with a security problem. Which makes it all the more confusing as to why they aren’t taking more of an active role in plugging the hole. Putting the onus on users to stop using third-party apps instead of cracking down on the apps themselves seems to say that, while Twitter took a hard line with developers Snapchat is less afraid of causing waves in developer relationships than it is in taking a position of plausible deniability.

Internet/mobile security is an increasingly hot topic in not just wonkish academic circles but among the base of everyday user. We’re turning more and more of our quantified selves over to the apps and networks we use. And that trade off has to come with a level of responsibility for safeguarding that information on the part of the apss and networks. In this case Snapchat does not seem to be hitting that mark.

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