Viewing the future of social networks from Snapchat: The rise of self-destructive data

Foreign media wrote last week that, while the widespread popularity of social networks has narrowed the relationship, it has spawned a variety of privacy issues. With the gradual awakening of the privacy consciousness, the new application represented by Snapchat has sprung up with the non permanent data sharing model. The data shared by these services carries a "ephemeral" feature that greatly eases privacy concerns and is likely to be the future direction of social networking.

Snapchat

In the fall of 2012, New York State Feng Muchengjian (Maplewood) Columbia High School student Sally Ike heard from friends about an interesting new application. Her friends say the app, called Snapchat, can be downloaded to smartphones for free and can share photos. Like many photo apps, it's easy to do: Take a picture and send it out. But its biggest feature is that when a friend opens the message, the photo is automatically deleted in 10 seconds.

Some teachers even prohibit the use of smartphones during classes, so students are carefully launched "underground work." However, if the phone is fully held in the palm of the hand, and then placed under the table secretly used, will not be found by the teacher.

Ike kept receiving photos from others, and as the number of uses increased, she gradually fell in love with the app. Now, she sends all kinds of pictures like everyone else. Opening a picture in Snapchat, she says, feels like a gift: you never know what you're going to see.

Because the information disappears quickly, it does not bring any pressure on the sender. You can also use it to send video. If someone cheats and tries to save the photo, the application automatically sends the message to the sender. Ike said it would be embarrassing to be caught. "I was thinking that it would be valuable until I graduate from college next year." She said, "You can use 10 seconds to quickly see the expression of a friend, which is more personalized than the text." ”

This February, Snapchat has become the iphone platform in America's second-most popular free photo and video app, after YouTube, before Instagram. According to market research company App Annie, Snapchat ranked 19th in all free apps. Snapchat's website says more than 50 million photos have been shared with the service every day.

Occupy the advantage of the day

Its emergence forced competitors to launch similar products. Last December, social networking giant Facebook unveiled an app called Poke, similar to Snapchat, which also allows users to send "self-destructive" media content. Instead of depressing Snapchat, however, it has made the social networking star even stronger. This January, the U.S. technology blog TechCrunch will Snapchat selected as the 2012 "fastest-growing start-up companies."

Snapchat was born in the early 2011 to a fraternity society. At that time, Evan Spigger (Evan Spiegel) and Bobby Melfi (Bobby Murphy) studied at Stanford University, they were "brothers" of the Kappa Sigma community. Spiegel studied engineering, and Murphy read the computer. The two decided to develop a mobile app that would facilitate online social networking among friends, but would not leave any records.

They later explained that the inspiration came from the unpleasant stories they had heard over the years: private photos, which had been intimate with each other, were widely disseminated within social networks, and could not be removed by search engines. Neither Spiegel nor Murphy commented.

The application of Spiegel and Murphy has been an advantage. When they were busy developing prototypes that summer, former U.S. Congressman Anthony (Anthony Weiner) became the focus of media attention because of the bad photos given to netizens, and the idea of "not being photographed properly and losing the future" has been deeply rooted. In the fall of the same year, Snapchat in the Apple App Store, the download quickly soared.

"The goal of Snapchat is not to capture the traditional ' Kodak moment '," Spiegel wrote in a corporate blog in May 2012, "but to communicate with a complete human emotion-not just on a beautiful or perfect side." For example, when I think I'm good at imitating the nose mole, or if I want my friends to see the girl I love. ”

Privacy and pornography

Adults have long warned children that if they are not careful, some problematic behavior will be permanently recorded. Over the past few decades, such records have grown larger, more accessible and more open. Along with the advent of cloud computing, digital space is also in rapid progress. Only one institution in the Library of Congress is busy collecting 170 billion of Twitter messages.

The business model of today's social media and search engines is to collect and store a variety of behaviors and interests, and then sell the information to marketing agencies. Enterprises in the Organization and exploration of the various social life of users, but also more handy, whether it is party photos, or clothing shoes and hats preference. The graph search, launched by Facebook last month, is a tool for retrieving the past information of its 1 billion users.

In such an environment, permanently recorded social information is naturally disturbing. Danah Boyd, a senior researcher at Microsoft, said it was not surprising that non-permanent social media first gained the favor of teenagers. "People who have a direct impact on the growth of such supporters have always wanted to monitor them," he said. "The surveillance is not from companies or countries, but from teachers, admissions officers and parents," she said. ”

Snapchat just released, in order to promote the application, Spiegel and Murphy carefully selected a picture of a beautiful woman with a flatters smile. This hint is not submerged in the media. Despite all the good wishes of Snapchat, everyone soon agreed with the fact that the two big boys of the Kappa Sigma did create a channel for people to get pornographic content on smartphones.

For years, Barss said, it was in the pursuit of such a group of "merry people" that all kinds of technology had been developed, from printing presses to VCRs, from pay-TV to streaming video to high-speed cellular networks. "Now, the same thing may happen again in Snapchat," he said. "he said.

Many emerging communications technologies appear boring and laughable for the first time in the eyes of mainstream users, but their widespread use is then gradually apparent. "I will not send any ' sex interest '. "But so far, none of my two kids have had a picture on the Internet because I don't want to lose control of the photos," said Buss. This is a permanent record. If there is an app that allows me to share photos with my family and let them disappear for a limited time, I might be willing to use this technique. In this way, you can understand how this app gets more mainstream usage. ”

Great Business Opportunities

If the entrepreneurial life cycle, Snapchat is still in the "larva" stage, their energy is entirely in the user experience, the brand and marketing staff are indifferent, but one day, this will become their source of profit. (Companies at this stage may also attract takeover offers from larger, older technology companies.) Gigaom, a technology blogger, reported last December that venture capital firms such as Benchmark had completed a round of Snapchat investments and injected $8 million trillion into its $50 million trillion valuation.

Benchmark's general partner, Matt Cohler, was responsible for the deal, but he did not comment.

Marketers are Snapchat on the sidelines. "If a client asks us what we think about this, I would say, don't turn a blind eye to it, but consider the real benefits," said Ken Burbary, chief digital officer of Campbell Ewald, American marketing and communications company. Snapchat is still unclear. ”

Whether or not the app will bring in money, its breakneck growth has shown a huge business opportunity – specifically, to launch services for people who are increasingly worried about social media footprints.

Reputation.com, who specializes in selling online reputation and privacy services, said the company's CEO, Michael Fertik, says his clients have grown 1000% from two years ago. The increase, he argues, reflects concerns among consumers about how to collect data online. "The data is valuable now and everyone wants it. "he said.

Fordick says consumers are becoming increasingly aware that their photos and status updates posted on the web may be in the online world forever. Once unpleasant photos are released, it becomes difficult to delete the servers that are stored on social networks or the phones of friends. Many of the public, he says, have yet to realise that their data will not only be stored, but also analysed and analyzed.

Reputation.com has tried a browser plugin that encrypts all the content you post on Facebook. If a friend wants to see photos and status updates, he or she must use a special key to decrypt it and no longer have access to the data directly from the Facebook server. The product also allows users to set a "lifetime" for their published status updates. "You can say, ' All information I post will be deleted in 20 minutes ' or set the date of deletion to January 1 or the day of graduation." "The app has attracted 1 million people to download in a few weeks, and the potential demand is obviously huge," Fordick said. ”

Fordick said Reputation.com later abandoned the product and instead focused on developing more lucrative services. He said the company now focuses on collecting a large number of data files about users ' Internet habits, and then allowing individual users to control how the data is sold.

"We're collecting data and then letting our users selectively expose the data to third parties, and do it in a completely open and transparent way, rather than letting your data be used by others without any knowledge or permission every day, and you have no idea what they want to achieve. It's like the "Serf Liberation Movement" of the digital industry. "Fordick said.

Heightened public concern

Snapchat and Reputation.com's growth has benefited from public concerns about privacy, and surveys show that such concerns are widespread. A study last year by the Pew Research Center found that about 57% of users "used to uninstall or refuse to install an app because they were unwilling to share personal information." "In January 2013, Ponemon Cato, a research institute specializing in privacy and security issues, found that social media is the least trusted industry in terms of protecting the privacy of users ' networks."

In the face of growing anxiety, many young and old people want the government to intervene. In a 2010 survey, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, found that while young Americans were often viewed as a group of people who had no scruples about social media, they were as anxious as their parents in the face of permanent social records. Of the 18-24-year-old respondents, about 88% per cent believed that legislation was required to require websites and advertising companies to delete all relevant information at their own request. The survey found that 45-54-year-old respondents agreed that the proportion of the idea was about 94%.

Concerns about the indelible data trail have sparked a global campaign to claim "forgotten rights". Argentine singer Virginia Dakunha (Virginia Da Cunha) sued Google and Yahoo in 2009, demanding that the two companies stop providing links to websites containing photos of her in search results. The judge ruled Dakunha win, and Google and Yahoo appealed. In 2010, the Superior Court overturned the first instance decision. Argentine courts are still hearing dozens of of similar lawsuits.

In January 2010, Vivigny Redding, Vice-Chairman of the European Commission, Viviane Reding, submitted a proposal for privacy legislation that included a provision on "the right to be forgotten". The move sparked widespread criticism from tech-industry executives and legal academics who thought the move would generate more problems.

Opponents worry that such a clause would transform Google, Facebook and other internet companies from a free platform into a multinational censor. Jeffrey Rosen, a law professor at George Washington University, wrote in the Stanford Law Review last year that the Jeffrey's proposal "will be the biggest threat to internet freedom of expression over the next decade".

For example, according to Vivigny's proposal, "if people post photos of themselves and then go back, but Facebook and Google failed to delete the photos, they face a maximum fine of 2% of their full-year profits." Even if the photos have been widely disseminated, these companies are still responsible. ”

Lack of ability to forget

At present, almost all Web sites adopt the default settings, will be the information that people share permanently stored in the cloud. In the book "deletion: The forgotten virtues of the digital age" (delete:the virtue of forgetting in the Digital age), Oxford University professor and lawyer Victor Maire-Schoenberg (Viktor Mayer-schonberger) It is believed that this unavoidable situation brings problems to individuals and societies and that they need to have the ability to forget to move forward. He points out that indelible memories can lead to social paralysis, tying people to the past and preventing them from trying new challenges.

Meyer-Schoenberg believes that all kinds of online information should be supplemented by a specific expiration date. While not all data should be limited to a few seconds of usable time like Snapchat, the key is to include a "self-destruct" button in all of the online information so that users have control from the start.

Snapchat is not the first company to try non permanent content sharing. Meyer-Schoenberg said he had interviewed the senior executives of Drop.io, a start-up company, while collecting material for the deletion. The 2007 New York service has many features, including a "self-destruct" date for the file. The company's founders once revealed to Meyer-Schoenberg that the user's pursuit of the feature was unexpected.

Facebook bought Drop.io in 2010 and then shut down the service completely. Drop.io co-founder Sham Lessing (Sam lessin), who is currently the Facebook product manager, declined to comment.

"Someone always asks me, ' Why is the market not responding? '" "Snapchat and other services are responding," Meyer-Schoenber said. Snapchat is a great example of creating short-lived data. The market does have this demand. Facebook has been a failure in this area because Mark Zuckerberg, in his bones, Zuckerberg that all data has hidden value, so it's important to see the data. He tried to keep all the content permanently. "But a Facebook spokeswoman refused to let anyone in the company interview.

Facebook's poke apps, while mimicking Snapchat, have been muted. According to App Annie, the app ranked No. 634 in America's free iOS app in early February this year. "I don't think poke will succeed because people don't trust Facebook at all. Boyd said, "In everyone's eyes, it has only one purpose, and that is to strangle Snapchat." ”