Social Sharing - Snapchat and the NSA
Marc, Randy, and Scott discuss the inherent weaknesses of social sharing on the internet, and how recent NSA revelations have pushed these privacy issues into the mainstream.
Links
- Scott and Randy will be attending the CMX Summit on 2/3/14. Please use the discount code RFARMER15 for 15% off registration.
- Yes, the NSA infiltrates computers that are not on the network.
Experience a totally new way to share today. Snap a photo or a video, add a caption, and send it to a friend (or maybe a few). They’ll view it, laugh, and then the snap disappears from the screen - unless they take a screenshot! If you want to share a Snap with all of your friends, add it to your Snapchat Story, where each Snap lives for 24 hours until it disappears, making room for the new.
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.
The allure of fleeting messages reminds us about the beauty of friendship - we don’t need a reason to stay in touch.
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Please note: even though Snaps are are deleted from our servers after they are viewed, we cannot prevent the recipient(s) from capturing and saving the message by taking a screenshot or using an image capture device.
— Snapchat description 6.1 on iTunes - privacy claim changes since version 3.0 in bold italics.
Transcript
Randy: Snapchat is like that punch on the shoulder. You can send a photo or a little message. It’s completely ephemeral and it’s important that it is ephemeral. I know that you’re not supposed to keep it and you know that I know that.
Host: Welcome to the Social Media Clarity Podcast. Fifteen minutes of concentrated analysis and advice about social media in platform and product design.
Randy: Welcome to episode 10 of the social media clarity podcast, I’m Randy Farmer.
Scott: I’m Scott Moore.
Marc: I’m Marc Smith.
Randy: Only a short bit of news today, come and meet us live. Scott and I will be attending the CMX Summit, February 6th, 2014 in San Francisco. This is being billed as the world’s community building leaders coming together at last. Save 15% of attendance by entering the discount code Rfarmer 15. That’s R-F-A-R-M-E-R-1-5. We hope to see you there.
Marc: This week’s show is in some ways about a topic that we talked about with Bernie Hogan several shows ago about the idea of context collapse. [Episode 3: http://socialmediaclarity.tumblr.com/post/61389795092/save-our-pseudonyms-s01e03-the-second-of-two] What happens when there is no “private”, no “backstage”?
Are we reaching peak social media? Have we reached the point where people are now going to recoil from the share reflex? With significant implications for the existing set of internet businesses that are certainly both cultivating and sustained by this share reflex. On the other hand, there may not be any alternative but to share.
Scott: There’s the angle of government intrusion, corporate intrusion and then there’s the “audience”.
Marc: Who are the potential opponents or attackers here? I think everybody gets fixated on the one and only – the US government is the attacker. I think we then say, I’m unlikely to be the subject of their attack as I’m really not doing anything, but I think we need to add to the list at least two additional classes of attackers, one is internet businesses. For example Google having bought Nest now knows how warm you like it and how cold it is in your house at all times. That’s an added level of insight into my home but I don’t think any other business has ever had.
Randy: Data gains value in context. Just measuring the amount of electricity and gas and water delivered provide some great profile data – but it’s nothing compared to knowing how often I buy swimwear correlated with large changes in water consumption in June. The problem is the volume [of data] and how it defines context. It’s the diversity [of data]. The more different kinds of data you have, the more accurate picture you can create.
Scott: I want to add at least two more attackers. There’s a more personal level. On one front you have malicious actors, people who like to disrupt what you’re doing or you have on an individual level as a community manager or as a social media manager, people who want to disrupt. Either they have a grudge against you or they just feel like you’re vulnerable.
Randy: Personal enemies.
Scott: Yeah, we can do things with corporations and governments that you can’t necessarily do when somebody is just out to get you. I have had plenty of people in my past who I always have to assume “Everything I say to you, you are cutting and pasting ensuring with all your friends and laughing behind my back because I am the authority figure and I have now become the thing against which you define yourself, and this is part of how you’re going to do it which is by revealing anything I say in a private context”, it’s not private.
Randy: We’re wandering all over a question about “expectation of privacy.” It’s not whether or not there’s an expectation of privacy, it’s really only about what repercussions can there be for violating relationships. One of the interesting things I find when I talk to people about Snapchat, people say, “Oh, it’s just a way for teenagers to send naughty selfies to each other,” I’ve literally heard that quote. I’m surprised because I think I understand exactly what’s interesting about subject.
When you were young, you were actually learning these rules, what to share and what not to share and what is comfortable, what’s uncomfortable. Like, the first time you punch a buddy in the shoulder, you find out right away whether or not that’s an acceptable form of affection. Either they go, “Hey,” or they punch your back in the shoulder. Snapchat’s like that punch on the shoulder. You can send a photo or little message.
It’s completely ephemeral and it’s important that it is ephemeral. I know that you’re not supposed to keep it and you know that I know that. When I send you a picture or something I think that’s funny, what’s most important is me reading how you react to that so that I can learn: Do you think that’s fun? Does that poke you … does that make you irritated? We’re learning through ephemeral interactions. Snapchat provides a mechanism for us to have that social contract. We’re into trouble, when we believe that social contract implemented through software is inviolable. Truth is that when the Snapchat photo is up [on my phone], I can push the buttons on my iPhone that takes a photo of what is on the screen and now that is a permanent photo.
Marc: There’s a leak in the guarantee of ephemerality. There’s always this archival hole.
Scott: That leak is always available in all systems. The technology does not fix the problem of people holding onto things they shouldn’t or sharing things they shouldn’t. Where Snapchat recently had a security violation and they did not … as a first thing apologize and said we’re going to fix it. Instead they blamed other people for it. They missed the point. There is always going to be these windows – whether or not there are technical hackable spaces or not, people are using the client the way the [designers] didn’t expect and they can’t really guarantee privacy in that sense, they shouldn’t have to.
It should be, here’s a tool, it does some things that helps you socially enforce rules you want to enforce, but the technology cannot keep the image from being delivered through a server where it might be intercepted, it cannot prevent the user from creating a duplicate of it and putting it in a persistent store location like Facebook or taking it and showing it to your mom.
Scott: Snapchat [is] giving the false expectation explicitly or implicitly that your images are secure and safe and private – [this] is foolish. Where their reputation took a hit because they had this expectation and they tried to retain it. Let’s just assume: “Forget it, Snapchat is not secure”. There will always be some way of getting around the privacy aspect of Snapchat. There will be a way of being able to share those images one way or another. Let’s just pick up Snapchat and say, “Okay, I assume this is all potentially public. It’s not necessarily private. Is it still usable?”
I think the answer is yes because it solves the problem that Randy discussed in a future podcast with danah about storage. I can use this as a way of sharing images and I don’t have to store all of this data because it’s not intended to be stored. Yes, somebody might store it, but I don’t want it or if I’m getting it from somebody, I don’t want my phone filled with a thousand images because SMS stores them on my phone. I might want that feed of images coming through. I think I might find that interesting [without storing them].
Marc: I would argue they should say: “We didn’t fix this one and we’ll never going to fix any of the other ones and we’re no more secure than any of the other services.” It’s not that Snapchat had a security failure and violated your privacy. It’s that none of the other ones work either. We now know that your Yahoo Mail is not secure. Your Gmail is not secure; your Outlook Mail, your Hotmail, wherever your mail is in the cloud, it’s not secure because we know that at least one government has access to it and we probably should assume that more than one government has access to it.
Randy: There’s a real strong point in helping people realize that there is not a technological solution when you put your bits on a wire. Other parties can take them but given that, technology still can provide the tools that facilitate the kinds of contextual communications that you really want to have. We are connecting with people remotely that before we had this technology we could never even meet each other. Everything about online community and social media has united people who live a world apart literally or with people they would have never been able to reconnect with for value, for social value, for commercial value.
There are a couple of reasons people get confused about this. One is the people who are making the products, want to make broad claims. They’re not into subtle claims. Like Snapchat says: “We don’t keep pictures on the machine after a little while, isn’t that awesome?” It’s the implied portion underneath that says you are safe [that is a problem]. If you’re saying, you are safe, that’s not true. But the rest is true and the rest is valuable. I don’t know that any company is ever going to come out and try to educate the public on how weak the Internet is. I don’t see any advantage to that. But I do see a responsibility to say, “These are the things we can help with. These are the interesting ways you can interact with other people.”
Marc: I’m still taking the harder line that every effort to provide a feature called selected sharing is flawed. I’m hearing, “Yeah, but they all provide a social service for selective sharing. "Look, I put it in the private box and you went and looked,” so isn’t that on you that you saw me. I went on a vacation in the Caribbean and I was wearing a bathing suit and you didn’t want to see me in a bathing suit, you went and looked, so it’s on you. At least I did have the bathing suit on. I’ll just put that out there.
Randy: You went and looked around the thing that said private. You took some extra action to violate technical constraints and definitely to violate social constraint. We take technology out of the discussion, we’ve had this forever. Men are not allowed to into women’s bathroom. There is no mechanism that prevents that from happening.
Marc: There is a big difference though: it’s not just that we’ve relied mostly on social constraints. That’s true. But now there’s a new actor who is not found by those social constraints. In the name of either national security or annual profit and loss, I am going to watch more signals from each individual than those individuals are currently aware of. I’m not going to be able to guarantee the lack of propagation of some bits.
And so I want to make this to somewhat contentious argument – and I’m not happy with it, because I’ve got pictures of my kids I don’t want to share. I’ve got my own email, don’t want to share it. I’ve got my own bank statements, I don’t want to share it. I’ve got my own medical history, I don’t want to share it. So I’ve got a lot, but I’ve got a lot “I don’t want to share”. But my concern is, is that a feature that can practically be delivered reliably now that we know that you can infect a computer that is not connected to the internet.
Randy: I think that threat is actually the laziness. We introduced cloud computing before anyone understood any of this stuff.
Those of us who have been technical for a very long time have always known this as possible. We had wished that our government wouldn’t do it but we’d always known it was possible. And so for us the irritation is, “Oh, well, okay, that really sucks, I expected more.” But that expectation was not a technical expectation that’s a social expectation. The truth is you get some benefits out of cloud sharing your photos on Flickr and you’re making exchange.
Over the last decades slowly people have been going, “Yeah, I know Google reads my mail to send me ads, but I got free mail.” So we’ve been inured to this idea that, “Well, taking data is kind of natural.” That contract got evolved out in the press and so there’s a social discussion, how much data this Facebook get and is it evil? Most people will go ehhhhh, but now it’s been thrown in our face, but it’s always been true.
It was true before [that] people could take your private letters and copy them. How many famous people back in the days of newspapers had their scandals broken in newspapers? Computers were not even a dream in anyone’s science fiction [then].
Scott: How many writers or politicians have tried to set aside their papers as being destroyed after their deaths and get worked?
Marc: I think we could make the argument that there is something new because in the old days the only papers that survived despite the will of the deceased where the papers of relatively interesting people. Boring people, like us, we’re now in that process [too]. The cost of doing this has dropped so low that now it’s not just the boring, it’s everyone participating. There’s a point at which the scale creates a more qualitative change: something is new. It’s not just that yes, there were bugs and listening devices and people would sit there with headphones on, but now what we can do is do that for all calls at all times because it’s a computer.
Scott: The scale is of such that other entities can collect more information about me than I can collect myself and on one hand there is a lack of control concern but there’s also a, “Hey, wait a minute I want that too.” There’s a jealousy concern of I would like to be able to monitor my purchase of wool socks versus how often I turn on the heat.
Marc: I would say that the “MyNSA 3.0” application is how they should resolve this crisis. “Did you lose those pictures from the vacation? No, you didn’t. We’ve got you covered! MyNSA 3.0.”
Scott: These are the tips that I learned a long time ago just about personal communication and privacy. Speak as though you expect your private communications to be shared with those who hate you: whether that’s personal business or governmental. Don’t say anything you would not want to repeat to your mother’s face. And, originally this was “don’t say anything you wouldn’t want to see on the front page of The New York Times”, but today it’s “Don’t say anything that you wouldn’t want blasted out on twitter.”
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Host: Go to socialmediaclarity.net. This podcast is available under creative commons license.