WASHINGTON – People who share photos and videos with the controversial and popular Snapchat app do it because they know the content disappears after viewing – or at least they think it does.
A just-released iPhone app, called SnapHack lets the recipient save the Snap permanently, and review the content at will.
Snapchat, initially released in 2011, is largely used by teens and young adults.
In some cases, Snapchat is used to exchange racy photos, which are permanently deleted from the Snapchat server after being viewed for between 1 and 10 seconds, depending on the sender’s preference.
The developers of Snapchat have acknowledged it’s impossible to guarantee the photos haven’t been memorialized by the recipient. A Snapchat feature alerts the sender when the recipient has taken a screenshot of a Snap.
SnapHack is sneakier – it saves the photo or video without the sender realizing it.
To use SnapHack, the receiver must open the photo for the first time within the SnapHack app. If the image is opened first in Snapchat, SnapHack will not recover the image.
I tried it myself – here’s how SnapHack works: