Hey people, surprising fact of the day. If you send your photos anywhere, you’ve lost control.

Sent an image through Snapchat recently? If I’m honest the whole thing was pretty flawed from the outlet. The idea is that you can send an image or video and then, when your friend has viewed it, it’ll disappear from the screen.

Hey people, surprising fact of the day. If you send your photos anywhere, youve lost control.

The image should get removed from Snapchat servers too, and with over 700 million photos and videos per day, the service is heavily used and incredibly popular. Trouble is, many already know that you can keep the image simply by grabbing a screenshot of your iPhone or Android screen. Not only that, but today it has emerged that users of a third-party Snapchat app have had their images intercepted.

It’s not just a few either. Thousands of explicit images have been put online, with 4chan filling up as we speak. The worst bit about all this is the fact that over half of the Snapchat userbase are teenagers aged between 13 and 17.

Snapchat have stated that ..

Our servers were never breached and were not the source of these leaks. Snapchatters were victimised 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.

Ahh, that’s OK then. It’s the users at fault because they (like everyone) didn’t read the huge terms and conditions or ignored them.

We vigilantly monitor the App Store and Google Play for illegal third-party apps and have succeeded in getting many of these removed.

It comes after hundreds of celebrity nudes were leaked from Appleā€™s iCloud system, however here there’s a far larger number of images. Hackers are currently stating that some 13GB of images has been captured over many years. Some are pointing to a website called SnapSaved.com as the culprit, which once housed a service to automatically save images from your Snapchat account.

Hey people, surprising fact of the day. If you send your photos anywhere, youve lost control.

If you used this site you could be one of those affected, and any images could be appearing on the web for all to see.

Yet again, a supposedly secure service has been popped open. Sure, Snapchat itself wasn’t compromised, but allowing the system to be accessed via a “man in the middle” has meant that supposedly private images can now be seen by more than just your friends.

The main issue with all these security breaches is, unfortunately, the users and our reliance on others. We happily sign away it privacy the second we install many smartphone apps (which have access to your messages, calls, contacts etc etc). However, if you decide then to send a private image across the internet you’ve immediately lost control. Cloud storage, social messaging, online galleries, email or anything else – it doesn’t matter. Your images are no longer under your control. You can send a picture message of your bottom to your girlfriend if you want, but she might break up with you and upload it to her Facebook timeline the very next day.

Upload or send an image and you’re handing over the security and responsibility to someone else, so don’t go blabbing if your bottom ends up on the internet.