Tarun Wadhwa is a writer, researcher, and entrepreneur working at the intersection of technology and public policy.

You would think that it would be a terrible idea for a company accused of helping teenagers send each other sexually explicit images to feature bikini-clad young girls in their marketing. Most would avoid such direct associations, for good reason – it’s immature, and edgy when it doesn’t need to be.

But not the makers of the enormously popular app, Snapchat, which allows people to send images and videos that “self-destruct” after a few seconds.

The company claims messages are deleted once they are opened, but there have been a series of recent scandals showing that this may not be completely accurate.  Their product is far from perfect, and there are several ways to compromise the protection they offer.  It is never a good idea to send something over the internet that would damage you or your reputation if it became public.  While this may be common sense, it has little to do with how we actually act online.

The makers of Snapchat are right to reject the “sexting app” label — it’s not clear that this is what it is even being used for, and everyone deserves the option to communicate privately when they want, without automatically being branded as a pervert.

Within a few months of launching, the company has made an enormous and lasting impact on the culture of communication on the Internet, and we should all be grateful.

They have simplified a security process enough to the point that anybody can use it, while validating the market of the next generation of privacy-preserving ephemeral communication.  Most importantly, we may finally get a break from the forced permanence of the Facebook and Google world, where everything you do and share is a data point to be monetized and re-sold to the highest bidder.

And Snapchat isn’t even the best product out there — there’s a whole slew of communication tools that are more secure and functional making their way into the public eye.

One of those is Wickr, created by RSA veteran Nico Sell, a more serious security-focused app that uses “military-grade” encryption to send text, video, voice, and document files that can self-destruct after a given period of time.  Hospitals and law enforcement have expressed interest in a similarly functioning Android app, Gryphn.  Although it’s not “self-destructing,” keep an eye on the exciting and powerful suite of communication apps developed by encryption legend Phil Zimmermann’s Silent Circle company – they are not for “average” users, but they could provide enterprise and more serious clients a massive improvement in security.

What apps like these do is allow us a little bit more freedom to be ourselves, for better or worse.

In the copycat world of Silicon Valley startups and funding, expect to see a lot more “Snapchat for _____” type companies.  Finally, the lack of app creativity may work in the favor of consumers.  We have accepted the notion that what you do on the internet is permanent – a statement that is partially a truthful observation, and partially a threatening promise from the companies and entrepreneurs who are making it a reality – but it doesn’t have to be that way for everything.

Perhaps the greatest impact of this rising industry will be when the giants try to co-opt them, as Facebook attempted with Poke.  The issue of trust in these companies aside, it would be a winning situation for everyone for ephemeral features to be built into the services we already use.

We need more human-behavior-friendly default settings.

Privacy is complicated, and nothing is ever completely secure.  Nobody is immune from this, as Nicholas Weaver wrote in Wired, “even the head of the CIA can’t email his mistress without being identified by the FBI.”  But in the billions of messages already sent through Snapchat are a few people who didn’t have their lives ruined because of something they shouldn’t have shared.

The media can continue to ridicule the “sexting app” that so many young people are using, but they are entirely missing the point.  The same generation being blamed for the supposed “death of privacy” has become wiser than those who are criticizing them.

In a candid admission at the Milken Conference this year, former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, when recalling his college days playing in a band, told the audience, “thank God social media didn’t exist then, because if it did, I wouldn’t be here.”  The Internet wasn’t built with security in mind, and we’re still dealing with the consequences of that.  The next generations are going to be the ones who pay the true cost of the design decisions we make today.

Tarun Wadhwa is a writer, researcher, and entrepreneur working at the intersection of technology and public policy. You can follow him on Twitter – @twadhwa – or contact him directly at VB@tarunwadhwa.com. Also, check out his upcoming book, Identified, which will be out later this year. 

Image credit: Shutterstock/Shocked man

If you’re a daring, unruly malcontent of a teen, the last place you want to be these days is on Facebook.

As much as Zuckerberg probably hates to admit it, Facebook is now the Establishment of social networks, and for kids, that’s reason enough to stay away from it.

Enter apps like Kik, SnapChat, and WhatsApp, which you can use communicate quickly and secretly in ways that Facebook has so far been unable to. For teens, the apps represent freedom from Facebook, which, as Reuters reports, could be real a threat to Facebook itself.

The situation ties into the larger problem facing Facebook right now: While it’s obviously dominating social on the desktop, its success in the mobile world is less definitive. Facebook doesn’t have the sector locked down, which is opening up opportunities for smaller apps like SnapChat to carve out their own niches.

Facebook’s counter to has so far been acquisitions. When it purchased Instagram  last year, it was acknowledging that Instagram had become a large enough social threat that it had to be destroyed — or in this case, bought. Facebook pulled a similar move in 2011 when it bought group messaging app Beluga, which eventually became the backbone for Facebook’s messenger.

Facebook’s other reactions have been less successful. Poke, its SnapChat copycat, never quite made sense, nor did it take off. And we’ll forgive you if you can’t remember what Camera is.

All of this, of course, ties in with Facebook’s event later this week, when it’s rumored to announce both a custom phone and “Facebook Home,” its own custom fork of Android. Judging by what we’ve seen so far, Home could be Facebook’s attempt to pull all of its apps — Poke, Messenger, Camera — under one roof.

That, in theory, should help it leverage some control over mobile users, which is exactly what it needs right now.

Photo: Scott Macklin/Flickr

The rumors are true: Facebook has decided to try its hand at self-destructing messages with the release of Facebook Poke for iPhone.

The new Poke application, which landed on the App Store today, borrows ideas made popular by mobile app SnapChat and gives members an instantaneous way to “poke” friends with text, photo, or video messages that disappear after a few seconds.

“You can poke an individual friend or several at once. Each message expires after a specific time you’ve set, either 1, 3, 5 or 10 seconds,” Facebook explained in a blog post.

Poke joins Facebook’s lineup of single-purpose mobile applications that includes Messenger, Camera, and even Instagram. The social network’s motivation appears to be to make bits and pieces of its complex experience more accessible to members in a fun, lightweight, and entirely mobile fashion.

The Poke application certainly seems to be inspired by SnapChat, which people use to send photos and videos that self-destruct as well. SnapChat’s app is pretty popular with teens, but it may also have developed a following because of its sexting appeal. SnapChat is rumored to be raising an $8 million round of funding. That process may get a bit more difficult with Facebook in the picture.

Sand timer image via Shutterstock

That’s one of the reasons Facebook is reportedly working on a new app that will let users send photos — and maybe videos — to friends that will self-destruct. According to AllThingsD, Facebook is testing an app to compete with SnapChat, the social network that deletes photos and videos seconds after they’ve been viewed.

SnapChat’s app, which has been accused of being a sexting tool, allows users to take pictures or short videos, add short, superimposed text messages, and send them privately to a friend. The sender can also chose how long the message should be viewable. As soon as the receiver gets and views the message, the timer starts. Once the message is deleted, it disappears from the receiver’s phone, the sender’s phone, and Snapchat’s servers.

Too bad there’s such a thing as screen captures.

After perhaps a slow start in mobile that Mark Zuckerberg blames on an over-reliance on an HTML5-based strategy to build cross-platform apps, Facebook has moving into the app space aggressively with standalone apps. Of course, it bought photo-sharing service Instagram for $750 million. It also has Facebook Messenger, a sort of SMS-replacement app on which messages do not disappear, and the apparently Instagram-competing Camera.

In addition, as part of a strategy to improve quality and get better faster, Facebook is now pushing out refreshes to its core mobile Facebook mobile apps every one or two months. Just in the past week, Facebook updated its Android and iOS apps, which are both now native apps, with better performance than ever.

The new SnapChat competitor is rumored to be going live sometime in the next few weeks. Little hint to Facebook: before Christmas would be a nice gift to your users.

photo credit: Shandi-lee via photopin cc