Sexting on Snapchat is rampant in high school today (I'm a current high school student). The self-destruction principle has allowed for people to feel comfortable about sending explicit photos to eachother -- in relationships, it's almost ubiquitous.

That isn't saying that Snapchat has removed the potential of spreading explicit content. As someone mentioned in another comment, screenshotting the snap circumvents the system. It's also just as easy to take a photo of the screen with another device -- both an untraceable and permanent record of the photo.

As a whole, Snapchat has had a net positive effect for people my age. I can attest that teenagers make unwise decisions now and again, and Snapchat has helped in that those rash decisions are less likely to bite us in the future. While I don't have the data to back up the claim that hundreds of thousands of kids have been protected due to Snapchat's impermanence, I certainly wouldn't be surprised if it was true. It's the most popular social network in my demographic for a reason -- it oozes the ephemeral teenage spirit.

There's a theory about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_compensation

> "Risk compensation is a theory which suggests that people typically adjust their behavior in response to the perceived level of risk, becoming more careful where they sense greater risk and less careful if they feel more protected. Although usually small in comparison to the fundamental benefits of safety interventions, it may result in a lower net benefit than expected."

There's a book too, with a special emphasis on on financial crises. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/oct/12/foolproof-greg...

> "In the run-up to the crash, consumers and even policymakers had come to believe that smart regulators and forward-thinking bankers had made the world of money a much safer place.

> "The fundamental insight of Ip’s new book, Foolproof, is that this very belief was a key factor in the lead up to the crash. When people believe they are safe, they take more risks – they drive faster, in motoring terms – and “speed makes everything worse”. Or as the economist Hyman Minsky, whose work Ip revisits, put it: “Stability is destabilising.”

There are applications in our field too:

- safety features for users might make them behave less safely (e.g. exploding messages)

- better reliability of systems might lead us to put more trust in them, leading to even bigger outages when they occur (e.g. centralising trust in cloud providers)

It's interesting to see things like Chaos Engineering (https://principlesofchaos.org/) introducing intentional "danger" into a system in order to improve system-wide stability. Of course, maybe Chaos Engineering will give us more trust in our systems which may lead us to take even bigger risks...

Yup, that's basically what I'm getting at, thanks for the links!

So, I'm okay with risk compensation if people are net doing better. I don't think that "if even one person is hurt by this, that's too much" is a meaningful basis for decisions, especially when there's a risk that even one person will be hurt by not doing the thing. So at the risk of reducing people to numbers, if, say, 100 teenagers send sexts when they otherwise wouldn't have and get screenshotted, but 1,000 teenagers send sexts when they otherwise would have sent them to a non-disappearing-by-default client, and now their photos don't get copied because of social pressure / high-but-not-impossible technical barriers, that still seems like a clear win.

That's the sort of data that I think would be very interesting to inform good engineering decisions, and also pretty impossible to get.

I would also expect people's propensity to take screenshots to be correlated to how sensitive the image is. For example, I would expect many people to take a screenshot of a nude pic their partner sent just so they can look at it for longer than the default timeout of a snapchat message; this is even more likely for teenagers who may be less mature about not betraying the other person's trust.

Indeed, that's the digital equivalent of the $5 padlock. Sure, you could pry it open with a crowbar, but most people won't. IMHO the situation is more of "opportunity makes a thief" rather than "keeping honest people honest" - crossing the line is very explicit in both cases, analog and digital.

I don’t think you can turn back the clock and do studies with any sort of control nowadays. The generation using Snapchat is the one prior to mine - they saw the value from my generation getting bit over and over from text logs and pics getting posted. Sexting existed the second the technology was there for it.

> I can believe both that these teens were going to sext each other anyway and Snapchat is keeping them safer, or that they weren't going to and Snapchat has convinced them that it can be done more safely than it can actually be done.

Related to

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_compensation

(I also don't know the answer!)

That's certainly true of Snapchat in the past: http://www.businessinsider.com/snapchat-doesnt-delete-your-p...

It's unclear how they protect images today, but they have never once mentioned any use of encryption.

I guess I quoted poorly - I meant "Is it true that Snapchat has likely protected hundreds of thousands of kids from severe bullying," not "Is it true that Snapchat does not use encyption in its implementation of disappearing messages".

I think it is possible that Snapchat has net caused more kids to get bullied as a result of ill-advised sexting, by being the company advising ill. I can see both arguments and I don't know which one is actually true.

slightly unrelated note but you both are also talking about the way the official Snapchat app chooses to handle snaps (opt in and notifying the user) when theres a multitude of workarounds and non-official snap apps only a google away that make it extremely simple to save a picture someone sent to you without the sender knowing.

Preventing phone-screen capture isn't really something you can't get around but Snapchat could certainly afford to put their money where the mouth is and try to provide their users with a safer experience by cracking down on 3rd party apps.