Snapchat clarifies terms, your ‘private’ pics will remain safe
Snapchat, the platform for messaging in text, voice, video or photo, was used world-wide for one basic and undoubtedly the best feature—self destructing messages. However, the social platform went down on its knees when the recent spate of private photos, which contained nudity, was spilled online. Snapchat’s servers were hacked earlier and millions of photos which contained regular to nude selfies were all over the internet. Snapchat was being used via third-party applications, which had the ability to store all messages that passed through it, even though they were self-destructible ones.
Read: Beware! Snapchat now has the right to use all your photos, however they want
Last week, Snapchat changed their privacy terms and conditions which read that every content, be it text messages, voice messages, photos or videos, will now be royalty-free and transferable to the host to store, use, display, modify, publish, publicly perform, broadcast and a lot more by Snapchat. This meant that the service will be ‘by default’ given the ‘transferable license’ to all your content you send out and they could use it however they wanted. This new T&C caused a huge backlash amongst the users, to which many responded as ‘scary’ and ‘spooky’ rules.
Snapchat immediately felt the heat and jumped into refuting its claims that their users’ private and ‘other’ photos/data will still remain private and will not be saved on their servers or distributed/published/used for other reasons.
Their privacy terms still read as follows:
‘You grant Snapchat a worldwide, perpetual, royalty-free, sub-licensable, and transferable license to host, store, use, display, reproduce, modify, adapt, edit, publish, create derivative works from, publicly perform, broadcast, distribute, syndicate, promote, exhibit, and publicly display that content in any form and in any and all media or distribution methods (now known or later developed). We will use this license for the limited purpose of operating, developing, providing, promoting, and improving the Services; researching and developing new ones; and making content submitted through the Services available to our business partners for syndication, broadcast, distribution, or publication outside the Services. Some Services offer you tools to control who can—and cannot—see your content under this license.’
Snapchat clarifies: (A post on its blog reads the following)
‘Protecting your Privacy
There’s been some confusion about the updated Privacy Policy and Terms of Service we rolled out last week. We never want to create any misunderstanding over our commitment to protecting your privacy.
First off, we want to be crystal clear: The Snaps and Chats you send your friends remain as private today as they were before the update. Our Privacy Policy continues to say—as it did before—that those messages “are automatically deleted from our servers once we detect that they have been viewed or have expired.” Of course, a recipient can always screenshot or save your Snaps or Chats. But the important point is that Snapchat is not—and never has been—stockpiling your private Snaps or Chats. And because we continue to delete them from our servers as soon as they’re read, we could not—and do not—share them with advertisers or business partners.
It’s true that our Terms of Service grant us a broad license to use the content you create—a license that’s common to services like ours. We need that license when it comes to, for example, Snaps submitted to Live Stories, where we have to be able to show those Stories around the world—and even replay them or syndicate them (something we’ve said we could do in previous versions of our Terms and Privacy Policy). But we tried to be clear that the Privacy Policy and your own privacy settings within the app could restrict the scope of that license so that your personal communications continue to remain truly personal.
You may wonder why we revised the Privacy Policy and Terms of Use. Here are a few of the key reasons:
The main thing we did was to rewrite the Terms and Privacy Policy so that they’d read the way people actually talk. We always try to be upfront and clear with our community.
We added language to the Terms of Service regarding in-app purchases. We needed to do that now that we’re selling Replays—and have some other cool products and services we’re looking forward to bringing to you soon.
To make it a little easier for friends to find you on Snapchat, we’ve clarified what info—like your name—will be visible to other Snapchatters and how you can modify that info.
Both the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy are important documents, so we encourage all Snapchatters to read them. For more info, please check out Snapchat Support, including articles like When are Snaps and Chats deleted? and our Community Guidelines.’
This means that Snapchat will not be stockpiling your content, unless someone (one of your recipients) takes a snapshot of your chat/photos and posts it elsewhere. Snapchat will not use your ‘private’ photos, chats or other content for any of their marketing or social activities and will not share it with any advertisers or business partners. The only content they will use are public Snaps and alike. This is to basically promote photos and videos for their new Live Stories feature which requires a public license for distribution.
On the entire topic, Snapchat defends itself by stating that the main reason for revising the policy and terms of use was that ‘They’d read the way people actually talk. We always try to be upfront and clear with our community.’
To chill out and be assured that your chats will always self destruct the way they used to be earlier and Snapchat will not save, store, share or distribute any of your private content.
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