As with Instagram, SnapChat is incredibly popular with school age children. It is a service that allows users to take a picture or short video and send it to another user. The recipient has up to 10 seconds to view the image, after which it is deleted. This instant-gratification-with-no-long-term-consequences nature of SnapChat has been its most appealing feature, but this does have downsides that have been widely publicised – particularly to do with young people sending sometimes inappropriate images of themselves to people they know. That it is easily possible for the recipient to capture and store the images they’ve received has been less widely known until recently. This raises the possibility of images that the sender thought would be instantly deleted being shared and getting much wider distribution – with the inevitable embarrassment and reputational damage that may result.
Here’s a useful guide for parents all about SnapChat from the folks at SnapChat themselves. Students might like to read it too.
http://www.connectsafely.org/wp-content/uploads/snapchat_parents_guide.pdf
A recent article I posted on Fronter for the pupils to read:
SnapChat is in the news – thousands of pictures leaked online – with more to come.
As we’ve been pointing out for some time now, SnapChat isn’t anywhere near as safe and anonymous as its users think it is. On Sunday 12th October 100 000 images from SnapChat apps were leaked online via a forum, with many more pictures to be released over the coming months. Hackers say that they’ve got 13 GB of users’ data to give away – is it yours? If you must use SnapChat, stick to the OFFICIAL APP – do NOT use clones or 3rd party apps with SnapChat.
