Another day, another gross invasion of online privacy.
On Thursday, a reported 200,000 photos and videos from potentially thousands of Snapchat users were leaked and posted to 4Chan, where they were quickly downloaded and shared.
A Snapchat spokesperson told the Huffington Post that the network itself wasn't compromised in the leak. Instead, hackers allegedly gained access to the photos through third-party apps that are designed to save Snapchat's ephemeral missives. "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," the spokesperson said in an email.
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BusinessInsider's James Cook reported that hackers had access to a staggering 13 gigabytes of photos and videos sent through one or more third-party service (either Snapsave or SnapSaved, which are in fact different apps).
Meanwhile, 4Chan users have apparently begun building a database of the leaked photos that is searchable by name. Just as the recent leak of celebrity nude photos was dubbed "The Fappening," 4Channers are calling this leak "The Snappening."
The Huffington Post alleges that "[it's] likely that many of the photos compromised belonged to underaged users," due to Snapchat's high user base of 13- to 17-year-olds. It's unknown whether all of those were nude images, but considering how kids today tend to use Snapchat, you can bet that a good number of them were. (Huffington Post)