Third Party Site May Have Stored 200,000 Snapchat Images
October 14, 2014
Members of anonymous online messaging forum 4chan claim to have access to as many as 200,000 Snapchat photos through a third-party app called Snapsaved. The smartphone tool allows creators to store photos from their Snapchat accounts. Anonymous members have said that a link will be posted, allowing users to download the photos. It is not clear who created Snapsaved, and the app’s site is no longer working. Meanwhile, Snapchat claims that its servers have not been compromised.
To install Snapsaved, users had to download the app directly from the site — a method Google warns strongly against.
Users would enter their login information into the site and Snapsaved would then store the photos and videos.
“Snapchat has had issues with its security. In January, the startup received intense criticism after a third-party application was able to expose the names and phone numbers of nearly five million Snapchat users,” reports The New York Times. “Snapchat had been warned by security researchers of a vulnerability in its security.”
Snapsaved should not be confused with the similarly-named Snapsave, an app that saves Snaps to Android phones. Georgie Casey, Snapsave’s creator, said that no hacked photos came from his service.
Meanwhile, Snapchat was quick to point out that the photos did not come from its servers either.
“Snapchatters were victimized by their use of third-party apps to send and receive Snaps, a practice that we expressly prohibit in our Terms of Use precisely because they compromise our users’ security,” explained a Snapchat spokesperson.
“I came across [Snapsaved] first around April 2014 and it had something like 100 Facebook likes,” Casey said. “I assumed no users would be stupid enough to enter their log-ins on a random website, but your average Snapchat user isn’t very tech savvy.”
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