Now You See It, Now You Don’t . . . Or Do You?: Snapchat’s Deceptive Promotion Of Vanishing Messages Violates Federal Trade Commission Regulations, 30 J. Marshall J. Info. Tech.andPrivacy L. 827 (2014)

摘要

This Comment will explore the recently popular application Snapchat, and discuss the ways in which the app's privacy policy has violated FTC regulations, responding to a recent complaint filed by The Electronic Privacy Center. Particularly, this Comment will focus on Snapchat's deceptive promotion of "disappearing" photographs and videos. Section II will illustrate the basic structure of Snapchat, detailing various illustrations of its use. Section II will also examine the regulations set forth by the FTC that Snapchat is required to follow. Section III will discuss possible methods that the average user can do in order to bypass the very thing Snapchat claims to prevent: the permanence of photos and videos. Section III will also demonstrate the application's shortcomings in deleting the photograph and video files. Subsequently, this Comment will identify how these specific shortcomings violate FTC regulations. Finally in section IV, a legally focused proposal for Snapchat creators will be presented in order for Snapchat to realign itself and abide by the FTC's proposed regulations, specifically through its privacy policy. The proposal addresses users' privacy concerns while still maintaining the FTC's regulations and taking into consideration Snapchat's desire to prosper as a business entity.