What I can figure out is why more hasn't been made of how the snapchat app doesn't delete viewed photos at all: it stores them in the phone permanently.

http://m.ksl.com/index/story/sid/25106057?mobile_direct=y

http://www.theguardian.com/media-network/partner-zone-infose...

Seems to me like a massive breach of trust which defies the entire claim of the app.

I was confused by this for awhile until I started hanging around a group of people who use SnapChat almost as much as texting. For the most part they share innocuous "here's what I'm doing" type photos. They use SnapChat because it's a really easy to send a photo to everyone on their list at the same time individually when they want to share a photo of what they're doing at that moment, with no feed or wall or comments to maintain later.

Thus, they really don't care if the photos are saved anywhere because they're not concerned with the privacy of their photos--at worst the snaps they share are unflattering. Their main concern is that they don't want to maintain any photos later, they just want to tell each other 'hi, here's what I'm doing' and forget about it.

In other words, to them SnapChat isn't a platform to share photos secretly, it's a platform to share photos momentarily. SnapChat even sells it as this:

>The images might be a little grainy, and you may not look your best, but that's the point. It's about the moment, a connection between friends in the present, and not just a pretty picture.

I get it now. I still don't like SnapChat at all (the UI is ugly, the UX is par, and I don't like the attitude of the company), but I see the user appeal and I see why the users SnapChat wants most will continue to use the app even though one of their friends may be keeping that picture they took of their thanksgiving turkey permanently.

How would that be an improvement over text messaging?

Thank god, finally some one explained it to me. I'm so released now.

Probably because SnapChat fixed that half a year ago.

Apparently, it's because a lot of HN commenters think that this kind of behavior is okay, because -- and I quote -- "he created an apparently billion+ dollar company almost overnight."

It's the same "high court, low court" inequality dynamics we see in the rest of the society, but this time in disguise of meritocracy.

I'm not attempting to defend Snapchat here, but it's probably because their primary user base is compromised of teenagers and college kids. I think it's fair to say that people don't value their privacy as much until they get older and experience the world for what it is.

are you an NSA agent?

That was a non sequitur, and basically HN's equivalent of a Reddit meme. Stop that.

Completely agreed. I wrote an article about precisely this: http://blog.samiurr.com/snapchat-another-example-of-the-hubr...

well, I guess the severity is in the eye of the beholder, or victim. A phone number identifying my name to a screen name isn't a big deal...It's unfortunate, but the world hasn't come to an end, it's not like the hackers were code breakers of the Enigma machine, where thousands would live and die as a result. I for one would call that 'massive' and 'severe'.

I think there is a generation who simply care not of privacy.

Is that really true? Why are people using Snapchat then, instead of SMS or even twitter?

It seems to me that the entire premise of Snapchat is that their users care about privacy (even if they are rather naive or uninformed about how privacy works).

in my opinion it's not popular because its private, its just easier to use to send pictures/videos to other people. the time limit makes it seem more "in the moment" good for a quick laugh and then its gone. a big plus is it lets you easily caption pictures and draw on them.