You seem to take position to defend the snapchat stance ... I read it as a validation that there is a tradeoff made by design, and anyone caring enough about privacy wouldn't have implemented the feature in the first place.
Privacy doesn't have to be the goal of every service, let's just admit that it not a main concern of Snapchat either.
Of course Facebook also has a lot of leaky behaviors concerning finding friends and friend suggestion. They also value service growth more than privacy, and that's their right.
Put hard limits on the rate or total number of friend lookups per account, especially if a lookup fails. Keep track of global lookups and lock down the global lookup rate if there is a large number of failures. Keep track of patterns in lookups. Disallow more than a few lookups for accounts that haven't sent or received any messages. Require approval by the receiver for a lookup based on a phone number before the username is revealed. Charge money for phone number based lookups or require some sort of identification. Only allow phone number based lookups from within the smartphone app, not via the API.
And so on.
This is not rocket science, it requires mainly only that the devs legitimately care about security and privacy. But if the problem is instead approached by cavalier developers who are only reluctantly tackling the problem after having been burned by bad PR due to previous breaches then the result will often be half-assed engineering that does little to solve the problem.
The biggest issue for SnapChat is, to be frank, they are a bunch of dumb-asses who got lucky and managed to cobble together a silly app that a lot of people wanted to use. However, the foundation their app is built on is a degree of privacy, but that privacy is just an illusion, it is not based on any substantive engineering whatsoever and the SnapChat developers are too clueless to actually take on the problems that need tackling. This is just the first of what will ultimately be many failures at SnapChat which will ultimately reveal the trust placed in the company to be completely misplaced, causing their user base to evaporate. They should have taken the acquisition offer, at this rate the chances of their company being in ruins in a few months time is very, very high.
Put hard limits on the rate or total number of friend lookups per account, especially if a lookup fails.
Easy: distribute the search across accounts. Also you'd expect most of the lookups to fail (most people in your contacts won't be Snapchat users).
Keep track of global lookups and lock down the global lookup rate if there is a large number of failure
Again, you expect a large number of failures.
Disallow more than a few lookups for accounts that haven't sent or received any messages.
Using the find friends functionality is intended to get you started with Snapchat. When you haven't sent many/any messages is when it matters most.
Require approval by the receiver for a lookup based on a phone number before the username is revealed.
Many users (myself included) would consider notifications of this volume to be spam.
Charge money for phone number based lookups
I don't know anyone who would pay to use Snapchat.
require some sort of identification
Yeah, because requiring strong identification totally makes privacy advocates happy.
Only allow phone number based lookups from within the smartphone app, not via the API.
Smartphone app has to communicate with Snapchat somehow, so the functionality is going to have to be exposed via an API. iOS is closed enough that you might be able to securely authenticate the app to the API, but AFAIK you can't stop the user from getting the key out of an Android app if he has root.
I can't comment on Snapchat's competence overall, but none of your solutions actually work. This is a nontrivial problem.
>The biggest issue for SnapChat is, to be frank, they are a bunch of dumb-asses who got lucky and managed to cobble together a silly app that a lot of people wanted to use. However, the foundation their app is built on is a degree of privacy, but that privacy is just an illusion, it is not based on any substantive engineering whatsoever and the SnapChat developers are too clueless to actually take on the problems that need tackling.
It depends on what kind of privacy you care about. Personally, I care very much about the privacy of my private communications (Facebook messages, emails, texts).
I don't consider usernames or phone numbers to be private information. Being able to find someone's contact info by name (and vice versa) is useful and people who make this difficult are just annoying. Failing to protect contact information is very different from failing to protect actual communications or metadata, and a callous attitude towards the security of contact information does not imply a callous attitude towards the security of communications.
There is a reasonable argument that a map between phone numbers and usernames could blow pseudonyms. But AFAIK most people use Snapchat with their friends - people who already have their names and phone numbers. If you reuse your Snapchat username somewhere where you want to be anonymous, you've already fucked up. Your cover is already blown. Whether it's blown to your friends or the whole world is a distinction without a difference.
AFAIK, it falls under PII. I realize some may not consider this personal info, but many others do. There are laws built around its protection and disclosure.
I think a failure to protect any data, including PII, is harmful to the user experience and a brand's image.
Comments
You seem to take position to defend the snapchat stance ... I read it as a validation that there is a tradeoff made by design, and anyone caring enough about privacy wouldn't have implemented the feature in the first place.
Privacy doesn't have to be the goal of every service, let's just admit that it not a main concern of Snapchat either.
Of course Facebook also has a lot of leaky behaviors concerning finding friends and friend suggestion. They also value service growth more than privacy, and that's their right.
Put hard limits on the rate or total number of friend lookups per account, especially if a lookup fails. Keep track of global lookups and lock down the global lookup rate if there is a large number of failures. Keep track of patterns in lookups. Disallow more than a few lookups for accounts that haven't sent or received any messages. Require approval by the receiver for a lookup based on a phone number before the username is revealed. Charge money for phone number based lookups or require some sort of identification. Only allow phone number based lookups from within the smartphone app, not via the API.
And so on.
This is not rocket science, it requires mainly only that the devs legitimately care about security and privacy. But if the problem is instead approached by cavalier developers who are only reluctantly tackling the problem after having been burned by bad PR due to previous breaches then the result will often be half-assed engineering that does little to solve the problem.
The biggest issue for SnapChat is, to be frank, they are a bunch of dumb-asses who got lucky and managed to cobble together a silly app that a lot of people wanted to use. However, the foundation their app is built on is a degree of privacy, but that privacy is just an illusion, it is not based on any substantive engineering whatsoever and the SnapChat developers are too clueless to actually take on the problems that need tackling. This is just the first of what will ultimately be many failures at SnapChat which will ultimately reveal the trust placed in the company to be completely misplaced, causing their user base to evaporate. They should have taken the acquisition offer, at this rate the chances of their company being in ruins in a few months time is very, very high.
Easy: distribute the search across accounts. Also you'd expect most of the lookups to fail (most people in your contacts won't be Snapchat users).
Again, you expect a large number of failures.
Using the find friends functionality is intended to get you started with Snapchat. When you haven't sent many/any messages is when it matters most.
Many users (myself included) would consider notifications of this volume to be spam.
I don't know anyone who would pay to use Snapchat.
Yeah, because requiring strong identification totally makes privacy advocates happy.
Smartphone app has to communicate with Snapchat somehow, so the functionality is going to have to be exposed via an API. iOS is closed enough that you might be able to securely authenticate the app to the API, but AFAIK you can't stop the user from getting the key out of an Android app if he has root.
I can't comment on Snapchat's competence overall, but none of your solutions actually work. This is a nontrivial problem.
Well said, you nailed it.
>The biggest issue for SnapChat is, to be frank, they are a bunch of dumb-asses who got lucky and managed to cobble together a silly app that a lot of people wanted to use. However, the foundation their app is built on is a degree of privacy, but that privacy is just an illusion, it is not based on any substantive engineering whatsoever and the SnapChat developers are too clueless to actually take on the problems that need tackling.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think they have a public API. The API the apps use is was reverse-engineered and exploited.
It depends on what kind of privacy you care about. Personally, I care very much about the privacy of my private communications (Facebook messages, emails, texts).
I don't consider usernames or phone numbers to be private information. Being able to find someone's contact info by name (and vice versa) is useful and people who make this difficult are just annoying. Failing to protect contact information is very different from failing to protect actual communications or metadata, and a callous attitude towards the security of contact information does not imply a callous attitude towards the security of communications.
There is a reasonable argument that a map between phone numbers and usernames could blow pseudonyms. But AFAIK most people use Snapchat with their friends - people who already have their names and phone numbers. If you reuse your Snapchat username somewhere where you want to be anonymous, you've already fucked up. Your cover is already blown. Whether it's blown to your friends or the whole world is a distinction without a difference.
AFAIK, it falls under PII. I realize some may not consider this personal info, but many others do. There are laws built around its protection and disclosure.
I think a failure to protect any data, including PII, is harmful to the user experience and a brand's image.