For Your Eye's Only: Snapchat Believes Delete is the Default.

Snapchat’s CEO Evan Spiegal, spoke at an event in NYC on Tuesday to discuss the mobile app’s success and reputation. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Snapchat, it allows users to take & send photos (and short videos) to other Snapchat connections. The catch? The recipient can only see the image or video for a short, predetermined matter of seconds. After the view-timer expires, it’s gone – forever. Well, kind of. The only way to keep a hold on the short-lived picture is to screenshot while viewing it. Although, in that case, Snapchat will notifiy the sender that their recipient has screenshot their image. No way of being sneaky here!

But moving along, this new (and sometimes risque) messaging platform has a unique view when discussing its millions of users’ personal data. In short, Spiegal believes, “Delete is the Default.” Basically, not keeping record of the images sent each day is a direction Spiegal thinks will become the new trend for contemporary mobile application developers. In order to keep the integrity of the platform for each user, it’s important to keep data-anonymity.

This raises concern from marketers: what do explorative social media marketers, advertisers, etc. learn and leverage in terms of psychographic and demographic data? Essentially, if there’s no record of past data, how can we learn, improve and correct mistakes from the past?

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We get it, it “acknowledges personal growth” by not having to look back at embarrassing photos from years ago. But to be honest, looking back at embarrassing photos is an even better way to acknowledge personal growth. Don’t you think?

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Charlize Theron

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Lil Jon

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Brad Pitt

So whether you agree or disagree to hoarding a bunch of data from the past, Snapchat still serves as a fun, new way of sending creative pictures and videos.
Happy Snapchatting all!

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