2014 will be remembered for a number of things although one of the more unfortunate memories this year will be the almost unstoppable cycle of hacked nudie images. It all began last month with ‘The Fappening’ which if you remember was a never ending abundance of naked celebrity selfies which were hacked and stolen. Allegedly from Apple’s iCloud. These images made the rounds on reddit and 4chan with new images seeming to pop up every week. However, that was nothing compared to last week’s news about Snapchat in which apparently as much as 13.6GB’s worth of images and videos were stolen.
If you don’t know about Snapchat, it is literally a chat client which allows users to snap selfies, annotate the images (the chat element) and send to specific users, friends, whoever. The big USP of Snapchat is images are not meant to live on. Unlike The Fappening images which will circle the internet forever, Snapchat assured its users their images would self-destruct within ten seconds of being sent/received. Well, that was the plan. Of course, their model was always fundamentally flawed due to screen capturing but what added (to what seems now an inevitability) to this was a number of third-party apps designed to keep or hold Snapchat images. Two of these in particular were Snapsave and Snapsaved (their names say it all). Since the Snapchat hacking (mockingly dubbed ‘The Snappening’) Snapchat have been quick to blame the third-party apps for the breach in security…and it now seems they were probably right.
Today on their Facebook page Snapsaved have admitted that they were indeed hacked. Snapsaved also made sure to clarify Snapchat was never breached and no leaked or stolen images originated directly from the Snapchat database. As a means of recourse Snapsaved advised that they have now deleted the website along with its entire database and contents. Although the size and number of images stolen from Snapchat dwarfs The Happening what has caused even more controversy is a significant portion of Snapchat’s users are teenagers. Leading to the assumption that a number of the images were of minors. In respect to this, Snapsaved did acknowledge how serious the issue is and did seem to offer a sincere apology for this while accepting their share of their responsibility. One other contentious issue is that Snapsaved clearly state that the amount of images taken were nowhere near the 13.6GB claimed and instead insist the breach was much closer to the 500MB mark. Although in reality, from what reports are saying the true figure is likely to be closer to the alleged 13GB mark with apparently 90,000 images and 9,000 videos in circulation. Lastly Snapsaved did make the point no personal information was breached or stolen although it’s pretty obvious to those whose images were hacked – it can’t get much more personal than it already is.