[turs0und]

Quoted from article:

“You grant Snapchat a world-wide, perpetual, royalty-free, sublicensable, 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,” the Terms of Service state.

This is what it takes for the company to start monetizing seriously. I certainly expected it. Facebook did this like 20 times.

[hkmurakami]

For a platform that promised an empty promise of privacy, that change seems particularly onerous.

[calinet6]

The mistake is to assume that their main differentiator is secrecy or privacy. It isn't. It's convenience, immediacy, ephemerality and its effect on how you communicate, and one-to-one direct visual communication—in that order, in combination. It's the experience, not the immaterial promises they make.

Privacy was always an empty promise, and it never mattered to the vast majority of their users.

[nitrogen]

Ephemerality doesn't truly exist without secrecy and privacy in this case. It's one reason I don't use snapchat, because the "experience" is misleading.

[calinet6]

It does, in fact, exist. The experience of ephemerality is all that's necessary, and the experience is that you take a photo, it exists for 10 seconds for all intents and purposes users care about, and then disappears. Disappears here means that I, my friends, and people I care about ever see it again. They don't, I don't, so I'm happy.

Remember, you are not their target market. Their target market is 2% people like you (nerds concerned about privacy and indirect/intangible principles) and 98% people who just want the experience.

[nitrogen]

I still think those 98% would be upset to know that someone somewhere still has access to those photos. It would certainly change the behavior of a huge chunk of them w.r.t. the service.

[onewaystreet]

Snapchat hasn't promised privacy since the FTC told them to stop last year.

[loceng]

Maybe they're lining up their TOS to be acquired by FB.

[mkolodny]

I think they're past that point. Lining up their TOS to go public.

[JonFish85]

How are they past that point? I doubt if they're all that close to an IPO in the sense that they haven't really proved any sort of monetization that can come even close to justifying even a billion dollar valuation. If they got an offer from FB I have to think they think long and hard about taking it.

[ljk]

Stupid question: who's going to invest in it? Don't these social network sites lacking real profit? Are more people going to dump money on it because they hear the kids talk about snapchat?

[turs0und]

Who knows, good old Microsoft may want to put more cash down than FB or others on an app that gave then a legit piece of millennial mobile activity.

[onewaystreet]

Snapchat already turned down two offers from Facebook. Maybe a third will be the charm.

[jeffmould]

Completely agree. It seems that some people tend to think that each time a new social network emerges there is going to be some moment where suddenly the terms are going to change completely in favor of the user. These new terms are no different than any other terms of service I have read for a social network.

You can find almost a word-for-word copy of this text in the LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, and I could probably go on, but those are only the ones I verified the wording on. IANAL, but I would agree that without this line it would be very difficult from a legal perspective to monetize the site alongside the user content.

[frostmatthew]

> These new terms are no different than any other terms of service I have read for a social network.

Snapchat's selling point is that the messages/images are deleted after the recipients have seen them - this isn't the case for other social networks.

[RubyPinch]

Snapchat's promotional material even encourages screenshotting etc

"You choose what to keep" is their selling point