As if Monday wasn't grievance enough, Utah-based company Decipher Forensics found another reason for cell phone users to mourn. Snapchat, one of the top-selling free apps for Android and iPhone, was exposed last week for some serious security flaws -- namely, the permanence of presumably long-lost photos.
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The app has been downloaded more than 5 million times in the Android marketplace and shares around 150 million photos a day. It draws its popularity from one very alluring feature: Shared photos sent via text are available for only 10 seconds. Incidentally, this makes the app very appealing to the not-so-camera-shy community of sexters, who take solace in the fact that their nude selfies are temporary. Or so they thought.
According to Decipher Forensics, nothing on Snapchat is ever truly gone. Just last week, the company successfully recovered deleted Snapchat photos from an Android device, explaining that not only were the photos not deleted by the app, they were stored on the phone.
For a more detailed rundown of where the photos go and how Decipher Forensics recovered them, check out the company's blog.
Of course, tracking the deleted photos down is no simple feat. The company requires special forensics software and a day's work to uncover the deleted images. But for $300 to $500, they are now offering deleted image recovery as a service for parents and law enforcement.
The company is currently working on making the same deleted image recovery happen with iPhone devices. So you can go ahead and wipe off that grin of Apple superiority.
It's times like this that make us nostalgic for the age of the landline, when everyone's dignity was more or less preserved and the only people to see your naked body were either licensed or living with you.
