Snapchat, Whisper promise privacy but fail (miserably) to deliver

Social media apps that promise ephemeral communications or true anonymity frequently fail to live up to all meaningful expectations.

User locations are tracked without permission. “Disappearing” photos and messages are hacked in massive numbers. Users who thought they were communicating anonymously are discovered and linked to their real identities.

That’s just the start of the laundry list of allegations against services including Snapchat and Whisper. If there is a lesson to be learned from the past few months, it’s that nothing disappears forever, and people are often tracked by the apps they willingly use every day.

Privacy in the era of social media is a promise left unfulfilled. The events of the past couple of months make this abundantly clear. In almost every case, the companies place the onus of managing, maintaining and securing privacy entirely on users.

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