I would expect that if I were personally targeted by ie NSA, they could intercept the snaps in transit, and those copies would not be deleted. Short of that though, I certainly do believe that snaps are indeed completely deleted after they are viewed (unless the recipient makes a screenshot) because the risk to Snapchat of lying about that far, far outweighs any potential reward.
You're right, I could've been more specific - they definitely need to sit somewhere if the destination phone isn't on the network or something, but they are deleted once viewed or some timeout has been reached. This of course also doesn't consider ways that the destination phone could store the photo (screen shot or something). But as far as snapchat is concerned, it's gone.
As a thought experiment, if you were the head of ISIS or the Russian ambassador in Washington DC, would you or would you not expect your snaps to be "really deleted" aka actually private? Honest question, not trolling.
It's not meant to be secure, it's meant to be delete by default. Even without an exploit you can take a screenshot of the picture you receive.
However, defaults matter. Even if you're sending a private picture to someone you completely trust, if you do it by email or mms, they'll likely leave that picture lying around inadvertently for someone borrowing their phone to accidentally and embarrassingly stumble upon. With snapchat, the picture will be automatically deleted unless the recipient takes explicit measures to save it. THAT is the feature, not security.
What I can figure out is why more hasn't been made of how the snapchat app doesn't delete viewed photos at all: it stores them in the phone permanently.
As you probably guessed, Snapchat doesn't really get deleted. I sat as a juror on a case where some of the most damning evidence was a Snapchat the police obtained from the company following an armed robbery and car theft. Some people are really poor at planning and covering their tracks.
On one hand no, it was definitely a 3rd party that allowed sent snaps to be permanently saved.
On the other hand, perhaps Snapchat is making an unreasonable promise to their users (send data to someone else that will be auto-deleted) that is fundamentally impossible to enforce.
"A message/photo/video lasts for a short time and then goes away"
Not to mention this was never the case. The messages disappear from visibility on your phone, but those messages are preserved forever for the NSA, the FBI, the local police and most importantly, internal analytics for SnapChat.
If they rely on the client to determine when things are deleted from their service, they're doing something wrong. Never trust the client software! The only thing a rogue client should be able to do is surreptitiously send a copy of your pictures Somewhere Else (for storage). All the pictures sent to Snapchat should get deleted on schedule, regardless of who or what sent the pictures.
Snapchat didn't even delete the pictures, to start with. They just made them unavailable to the interface. Which is similar, and maybe enough.
Given backups and billing records and stored message histories and so on, its not really a question of 'deleting an account'. More like 'making an account no longer visible/available to the current interface'. Nobody thought they'd wipe any disks or anything, in anticipation of a big data breach, right?
Or, perhaps, as a tool for an individual user who, for miscellaneous reasons, wants to store his or her received snaps for use later. Again, the point, as given by the author and expanded by me, is that the Snapchat system contains a large security vulnerability, and that it is foolhardy to believe that snaps you send will be gone as soon as the recipient sees them.
Snapchat claims they delete snaps immediately after snaps are opened, but unopened snaps stay on their servers for 30 days after they're sent:
> Snapchat servers are designed to automatically delete Snaps after they’ve been viewed by all recipients. Opened Snaps typically cannot be retrieved from Snapchat's servers by anyone, for any reason. Also, Snapchat servers are designed to automatically delete unopened Snaps after 30 days. However, unopened Snaps sent to a Group Chat are deleted by default after 24 hours. [1]
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