Legal, Policies and Ethics

By Mikala Lindhardt

            Have you ever wondered why the “terms and conditions” or “privacy policies” are so long? My thoughts are they make them so long, so they seem, so it is unappealing to the user to actually read them and see what their getting themselves into. How many of us actually know what we agree to when we hit ‘Accept’ or ‘I agree’? Probably not a lot of us. I know I don’t.

            For this blog post, I want to take Snapchat and reveal what we actually agreed to when we decided to download this application on our phones.

            Snapchat is a social media application that is famous for the disappearing photos and videos after ten seconds or less. You are able to send a photo/video to your friends and have them vanish forever. Do they really vanish though?

            In an article written in November by Market Watch author Sally French said, “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.”

            That can be a pretty scary statement for some to know that the owners of Snapchat can take that picture we all think vanished and use if for their company or anything they wanted. Even though this new, updated terms and policies are a little bit alarming, Snapchat tried to console the concerns by saying, 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).”

However, Snapchat also said personal privacy settings within the app could restrict the scope of that license. In other words, your private snaps are still safe.”

            There are a lot of little policies we accept everyday that could potentially get us into trouble if we don’t understand what we are accepting. I think that the best way we can be safe is to educate ourselves and be smart when using social media. Think before you post or press send.

            To learn more about the Snapchat privacy policy click here.