Snapchat’s My AI – A Youthful Playground or a Privacy Nightmare?

19

October

2023

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A post on this very blog site from 2018 called Snapchat a platform in decline, and I agree with that statement. Not since my high school years have I regularly used Snapchat to communicate with someone. After a long period of inactivity and countless notifications piling up, I decided to open the app some months back and was met with a notification about updates to their Privacy Policy. At that moment I did not give it much attention, just agreed to the terms, and went to the user interface. A new feature at the top of the Chat function caught my eye, My AI.
My AI is a customizable, user friendly, engaging AI chatbot and is one among the many actions Snapchat has undertaken to regain their popularity. Remember those times when you opened Snapchat and disappointedly closed it, no new notifications and no one to talk to? My AI solves that issue, giving constant company to you in the form of information and entertainment, designed to better understand and cater your preferences. It is effectively your AI best friend, but less transactional than other AIs.

I don’t know if it was curiosity or boredom, but my mind immediately raced back to the updated Privacy Policy and I decided to give the whole thing a read. As of 15th August 2023, their new Privacy Policy contains some important changes. A major change here is expanding the amount and type of data Snapchat stores, most recently including conversations with My AI. This is on top of all the information Snapchat already amasses from their users, such as usage, content, device, and location information. “But every social media platform personalizes their user experience and employs targeted advertising?”, you might say. Point noted, which is why I moved on to how this data is being used by their affiliate companies. The screenshot below is the only information I could find, and clicking on the link would only lead me into an endless loop within the Privacy Policy statement.  

If I still haven’t been able to make you raise your eyebrows, I urge you to recognize Snapchat’s target group: teenagers.
Did your fourteen-year-old self have the same level of digital maturity and behavior that you currently possess? Did you truly understand the extent to which your data is collected, let alone the fact that this data determines the content you interact with on a platform? And finally, consider the rationale of using Snapchat: Why send pictures or texts that are deleted after being opened unless you do not want them to be saved? Other than by Snapchat, of course.

Attached below is the help my AI best friend on Snapchat provided me about a ‘common’ problem for teenagers. Make of that what you will.

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Is Instagram the new beauty standard?

28

September

2019

5/5 (3) Do you also catch yourself mindlessly scrolling through Instagram whenever you have got some time to spare? Believe me, you are not alone. But have you ever wondered how all these images of other people’s bodies may affect how you view your own body? No matter whether these pictures are your friend’s holiday picture, influencers’ gym selfie, or a celebrity’s beach photoshoot. You may think by yourself: “I wish I looked like her”.

Nowadays, the usage of social media is gradually growing and has already infiltrated into our daily lives. Instagram creates the illusion of perfection which is perceived by many as the beauty standards. In contrary to these beauty standards, our normal non-perfect lives seem somehow abnormal. As a result, some people may resort to drastic measures, or even eating disorders as their dissatisfaction with their body grows to try to achieve these unattainable goals as “beauty standards” (Dakanalis et al. 2014).

As we are scrolling through Instagram or posting pictures of ourselves, negative thoughts about our own body may arise (Holland & Tiggermann, 2016). A harsh comment by someone may result in dissatisfaction with our own body as many of us tend to interpret our social standing through comments or social comparison (Toma et al. 2008). A nice example is a video I encountered a few years ago by Cassey Ho, a social media fitness entrepreneur. Please watch the video below.

 

This video reflected how the comments by others on social media may affect how we feel about our own body. It made me start wondering how much of what we see are real on Instagram. Nowadays, there are numerous apps for altering your face and body as well as beauty filters to cover your imperfections (Fallon, 2014). Many of the pictures we see online are altered to enhance their features before it goes online. Even if I do not want to admit it, I will often find myself comparing to these influencers as well. I believe many followers of these Insta-celebrities do as well and what these followers think, actually becomes the new beauty standard.

This is just how trends work; they are going in and out like a fast fashion. Back in the day, flat chest and slim waist were in and now curvy body, thick lips and big booty are in. What is next? What do you think about the current beauty standard that is defined by altered pictures as the result of the current technology? Are you able to catch up with the current trend or will you rather alter yourself just to fit in? Let me know in the comments below!

 

Sources:

Dakanalis, A., Clerici, M., Caslini, M., Favagrossa, L., Prunas, A., Volpato, C., & Zanetti, M. A. (2014). Internalization of sociocultural standards of beauty and disordered eating behaviours: the role of body surveillance, shame and social anxiety. Journal of Psychopathology, 20, 33-37.

Ho, C. (2015) The “Perfect” Body [Video File]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsL7W-GHhJA

Holland, G., & Tiggemann, M. (2016). A systematic review of the impact of the use of social networking sites on body image and disordered eating outcomes. Body image, 17, 100-110.

Fallon, K. (2014). Streams of the self: The Instagram feed as narrative autobiography. In Proceedings of the interactive narratives, new media & social engagement international conference (Vol. 101, pp. 54-60).

Toma, C. L., Hancock, J. T., & Ellison, N. B. (2008). Separating fact from fiction: An examination of deceptive self-presentation in online dating profiles. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 34(8), 1023-1036.

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GoSpooky! How teenagers disrupt Snapchat marketing

21

October

2016

4.67/5 (3) And again I missed an opportunity to become a millionaire! At the moment millions of people around the world are watching ‘snaps’. For the elderly amongst us (>25): a snap is a photo/video on Snapchat. Snapchat started five years ago as a joke of a few students at Stanford, but today it’s one of the most popular mobile apps among the youth. A unique feature of this app is that snaps are only temporarily available. Snapchat is currently preparing for an IPO that is expected to value the company at $25 billion! That’s even more than for example Facebook ($16 billion) and Twitter ($18 billion).

But how can companies make use of Snapchat? This platform is particularly interesting, because it enables (big) companies to reach teenagers, a target group which barely uses traditional media (e.g. TV, newspapers). But these companies have a problem: they have no idea of how to run a campaign on Snapchat. Two Dutch boys (Tim, 18 and Liam, 19) jumped into this gap and started a company called GoSpooky: the first Snapchat marketing agency in Europe. GoSpooky creates Snapchat campaigns and strategies for advertisers. These lads expect a turnover of €150.000 for 2016 thanks to campaigns for e.g. ABN-Amro, Hema and Albert Heijn.

You might think that their young age is a disadvantage in doing business, but I have some bad news for you guys (BIM/marketing students). According to these chaps, graduates who begin with their job at a big company are chocked up with theories and models. Moreover, they are often not familiar with Snapchat (unless they learned it from their little brother/sister). A mistake that is often made by big companies is that they want to run the exact same campaign on all platforms, but it’s not a bad idea to do it slightly different on Snapchat. It is important to tell a story and to keep it personal.

We can conclude that Snapchat is one of the most interesting platforms of this time. It offers new opportunities for advertisers and the boys of GoSpooky did a great job by taking advantage of this knowledge gap.

Sources:

http://binnenland.eenvandaag.nl/tv-items/69923/waarom_is_snapchat_25_miljard_waard_

http://dewerelddraaitdoor.vara.nl/media/365691

http://leijp.nl/snapchat-bedrijf/

http://gospooky.com/

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The battle of Image Messaging.

6

October

2016

3.5/5 (2) In august, Instagram released its Stories feature, allowing its users to take, edit and post photos or videos that disappear in 24 hours. This caused a wide spread debate considering the fact that Instagram didn’t hide Stories was copied from Snapchat. In fact, Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom even admitted that the Stories where a direct imitation by saying that Snapchat deserves all the credit.

However, next to the obvious similarities, the image massaging platforms also have a lot of differences. Instagram’s Stories for instance have a much wider reach. Where Snapchat is the ‘new guy’, Instagram has double the users as Snapchat, users who come to life because of these Stories. Because you already have your followers on Instagram, it’s easier to get your Stories to a larger crowd. As an example, Nike generated 800.000 views in 24 hours for an Instagram Story, posted on the first day the feature was available. The most popular post of Nike on Snapchat got only 66.000 views.

Where Stories is better at some areas, Snapchat beats it at others. Snapchat is, apart from the basic Instagram Stories drawings and colour filters, big on its geofilters, face-mapping filters and motion filters. Snapchat also has a much better approach for advertising. Where Instagram doesn’t have any non-aggressive space for companies to advertise trough Stories, Snapchat created a whole separate page with plenty of space for companies to advertise.

 

Joining the game

WhatsApp also noticed that the photo editing feature in social media is getting more and more important. Therefor they released a function that allows users to draw on their photos and videos.  They also added the option to put stickers on top of your photo, again just like snapchat. However this could possibly be a distraction for a bigger issue, since WhatsApp received a lot of criticism when it changed its privacy policy in order to share user’s phone numbers and data with Facebook.

 

Who do you think is going to win the game?

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Snapchat: A Platform Mediated Network success story

29

September

2016

4/5 (1)  

Snapchat was launched in September 2011. It is a mobile app you can download to your iPhone or Android smartphone, which you can then use to “chat” with friends through photos, videos and captions (so called “snaps”). An unique feature of Snapchat is that these photos or videos are “self-destructing”. After a few seconds after it’s been opened by the recipient, it gets deleted instantly (Moreau, 2016).

Another social media application is Facebook. Launched in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg, more than ten years later it reported a revenue of 17.93 billion US dollars and an accumulated net income of 3.69 billion US dollars over 2015 (source: Statista). Like Facebook Snapchat is charging no costs to users. But a big difference lies in the fact that Snapchat didn’t had a clear business model. Years after the launch, people had no clue were Snapchat was planning to make money with. Therefore it was a big surprise that it had turned down a 3 billion US dollars offer from Facebook (Fiegerman, 2014), because Snapchat didn’t earned a dollar yet. At Snapchat they could only dream of revenues like Facebook had.

So why did Evan Spiegel, founder of Snapchat, refused this offer? The answer lies in the power of the network. Nowadays almost everybody has a smartphone and carries it everywhere at all time. Users are able to download Snapchat for free, making it very accessible. This resulted in a large user base of 200 million users. Compare that with other big social media platforms as Instagram (300 million), Twitter (302 million), LinkedIn (364 million) and Facebook’s (1.4 billion), and everybody will agree that Snapchat created an interesting and promising network (source: Investopia). The users of snapchat use the app a lot. Snapchat reported 100 million daily active users worldwide in May 2015 (source: Statista). The network is an essential part of the success of Snapchat and provide us with a good example of the network effect. The network effect is a phenomenon whereby a service becomes more valuable when more people use it (source: Investopedia).

After acquire such a large user base, Snapchat improved their app and service in such a way that money could be made. In an effort to move beyond just messaging, Snapchat introduced a new featured in early 2015 called “Discover”. After this update, the platform of Snapchat provides two services. First, there is the possibility for people to send each other snaps. Here users rapidly switch between the role of sender and receiver. Secondly, snapchat makes it possible for media publishers to send content to their large user base, using Discover. Here the role of sender and receiver are changeless. Discover allows media publishers to have daily content featured on the app. In this way Snapchat can make money, using the user base they built up.

Only a short time after Snapchat has launched Discover, it has been asking some top brands to pay $750,000 a day for placement (Adweek, 2014). In May 2015, only months after launching Discover, Snapchat was valued at 16 billion US dollars (Kosoff, 2016). Snapchat only provides the network, which illustrates the power of their network and Platform Mediated Networks in general.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Fiegerman, 2014:
http://mashable.com/2014/01/06/snapchat-facebook-acquisition-2/#S_oEAssOXmqj
Moreau, 2016:
http://webtrends.about.com/od/Iphone-Apps/a/What-Is-Snapchat.htm
Adweek, 2014:
http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/snapchat-asks-brands-750000-advertise-and-wont-budge-162359
Kosoff, 2016:
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/03/why-snapchats-valuation-is-better-than-it-looks
Investopedia:
http://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/061915/how-snapchat-makes-money.asp
http://www.investopedia.com/terms/n/network-effect.asp
Statista:
https://www.statista.com/topics/2882/snapchat/
https://www.statista.com/statistics/277229/facebooks-annual-revenue-and-net-income/

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SnapChat’s Awesome New Sunglasses

25

September

2016

5/5 (3) There are two important new things to know about SnapChat. The first one is relatively easy: SnapChat is called Snap now. The second new thing might be somewhat more of a gamechanger: Snap(Chat) will start selling video-grabbing sunglasses starting this fall. Shooting Snaps without your phone, pretty cool right?
Spectacles, Specs for short, tries to become a success in the market where the Google Glasses failed.

What are the specs of Snap’s Specs? They are sunglasses, that will be available in three colours, that will have a small camera in both front upper corners of the frame (see featured image). When the button next to left camera is tapped, the cameras will record for up to 10 seconds. Additional clicks get you 10 more seconds each, with a maximum of 30 seconds of video. The snap you make will be stored in your glasses until you transfer them to your phone. These so-called Specs Snaps will be saved under the memories section of the snap(chat) application.
By means of a lightsource, the specs will let you (but also the people around you) know that you are recording. Meaning: it will not be able to secretly film individuals around you, as they aware of the fact that you are making a video.
According to Snap, your Specs should last about a day on one battery. Additionally, a charging case will be available that will make your Spectacles’ battery last for about a week.

So, now the important question, how much will a pair of these bad boys cost you? $130, including the battery case. That is equal to the price for a new pair of Ray Ban’s (that cannot record). Also, comparing this to Google’s first initial price of $1500 for their glasses, $130 seems more than reasonable. Of course, Google Glass could certainly do more than Snap’s Specs, but where $1500 just seemed to scare potential buyers, $130 is more likely to attract early adapters.

Where Google Glasses focused on ‘being the future’, and GoPro focuses on the adrenaline junkies and sport fanatics, Snap chose to go for a different market segment: the day-to-day life of an individual who is not called Travis Pastrana. Think of the Specs as a GoPro for the ‘normal’ stuff. With the Spectacles, Snap choses to stay in the present instead of ‘being the future’.
In today’s Western world, where everything is recorded and put on social media, Specs help you do just that. Specs will help you relive your memories by focusing on video capture, rather than on augmented reality.

Of course, as can happen with every new product, things could turn south. The Specs might flop when it turns out the human race is just not interested in recordable glasses. But the fact that they actually look like designer sunglasses, have an affordable price, and that Snap simply focused on today’s trend of recording memories, builds a strong case in favour of Snap’s Specs.
I’m curious to see if this indeed becomes the new social media #trend, but the prospects are positive.

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