Using snapchat more privately

Privacy Questions
1

Hello!

Lately I have been finding myself in more and more akward positions becouse I don’t have any social media apps. A few of my friends told me that it really is time that I also should get a social media account aswell, specifically Snapchat.

In short; snapchat is an app where you can chat about things and can send pictures with it. They claim to delete the sent pictures when viewed from their servers (which I believe, since storing all of those pictures would take an enourmous amount of storage space, and it also has been verified once or twice). The app has 3 trackers in it

My plan to use it more privately is to set my profile on private (except for people I follow), only take photograps of the left half of my face (so I limit their facial recognition abilities), and set camera permission to Ask every time. Location (snapmap) will be turned off and any privacy toggles to disabled. I am on a grapheneos pixel 7.

What do you guys think? I will be using my real name on the platform, but with a simplelogin email and my always on VPN turned on. I know this isn’t a perfect and fully private solution but this should limit the data.

Does anyone have some other suggestions? I won’t be installing snapchat in a seperate profile I think, since that would take away too much convience in my opinion.

Thanks in advance and now I’m here, also thanks to the site contributors. Very helpful info out there!

2

Taking just photos of half of your face isn’t stopping facial recognition. Just be aware of that. Also Snapchat was known to keep record of the “disappearing” photos and messages. Not sure how it is today. But think about what else they collect, f.x. location data, your phone number, your contacts, and images from your gallery.

There is not really a way to use an invasive service in a noninvasive way. Just follow common sense and dont give more data and permissions.

It all really sounds like you need to make up your mind. Consider what do you protect and why and from whom. Also consider if you really need and want this.

3 Likes
3

since storing all of those pictures would take an enourmous amount of storage space

Not saying that they do (or don’t), but you’d be surprised how much data a company can store.

4

Snapchat affords no privacy & definitely does not delete any photos on their service. Maybe a better question for your friends is what it would take for them to adopt a privacy respecting alternative to Snapchat and perhaps explaining to them as to why they would want to do this including that they’re all being monetized with no compensation given back to them for their data. Not everyone knows that data on people is more expensive than oil or gold today.