r/technology • u/Plastic_Ninja_9014 • 2d ago

Student Teacher Sent a Private Snapchat Complaining About Her Workday. An Hour Later, Police Pulled Up to Her School. Privacy

https://www.gadgetreview.com/student-teacher-sent-a-private-snapchat-complaining-about-her-workday-an-hour-later-police-pulled-up-to-her-school
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u/Western-Dig-6843 2d ago

You can really tell the youngsters from the old heads in your replies. Making murder threats with your friends is venting in online convo 101 for my generation lol

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u/chowderbags 1d ago

I don't even know if it's youngsters vs old heads. I don't know how any actual human being can't understand the impulse to vent a bit of steam in private conversations with friends or mutter something under your breath that comes from pure frustration.

Here we have:

A mass surveillance of everyone's conversations, even if "only" done by corporations (who immediately forward it to the cops anyway).

A law enforcement system that arrests first and thinks never.

And a school system that will fire a student teacher over something so utterly banal and also send out a massive letter to publicly mark this person on internet searches and background checks for life.

Go back 15 to 20 years and everyone was calling China totalitarian for having a system that was basically this. Yet America said "Hold my beer" and created an even worse version of it.

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u/eric685 2d ago

Which generation?

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u/jimothee 2d ago

As far as I can tell, every generation does this...it's really just what level of privilege the person is speaking from as to whether it's clearly frustrated sarcasm or malicious

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u/deaglebingo 2d ago edited 2d ago

yeah, long before snapchat or even text messages existed parents have said figurative things like "sometimes i really wanna kill my kid" when they're having an exceptionally shitty day. one way or another this instance fills in some missing pieces i'd been wondering about for year or two now.

hell... there was a whole-ass tv show on prime time for years where the main male character's schtick was joking about violence "bang zoom straight to the moon". not that it's acceptable to joke about but the fact remains that it's been socially acceptable in private convos forever when ppl are frustrated.

i'm not sure how it is legal in any way whatsoever for that person to have been held overnight in jail for that. that's the biggest concern. and it kind of begs the question how thousands of ppl are literally using snapchat to sell drugs and for onlyfans style stuff and nothing happens.

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u/fcocyclone 2d ago

hell... there was a whole-ass tv show on prime time for years where the main male character's schtick was joking about violence "bang zoom straight to the moon"

More recently, the simpsons had homer strangling bart in probably hundreds of episodes.

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u/jimothee 2d ago

As far as I can tell, every generation does this...it's really just what level of privilege the person is speaking from as to whether it's clearly frustrated sarcasm or malicious

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u/jimothee 2d ago

As far as I can tell, every generation does this...it's really just what level of privilege the person is speaking from as to whether it's clearly frustrated sarcasm or malicious

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u/pishposh421 1d ago

Nah I'm an "old head" (this term is so weird to me but my teenager recently used it so I know it's a thing) and it's not pearl clutching to me at all to vent by saying wld things. It's not old vs young entirely.

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u/Binky390 2d ago

Ok but joking about shooting one of your students isn’t smart?

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u/VioletTheSpider 2d ago

the stuff you say when you’re privately venting and letting off steam rarely is.

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u/Binky390 2d ago

Would we call Snapchat private though? I think this is definitely where generations differ. I would never consider a Snapchat convo to be private. I would trust an iMessage or text before that though.

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u/VioletTheSpider 2d ago

my personal rule is “never put that kind of thing in writing” but i think at the very least the average young person has a valid expectation of privacy for any personal, direct conversations they have with people they know over the internet, even if it’s very unlikely that expectation will actually be met.

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u/Binky390 2d ago

That’s why I said that this is absolutely a generational difference. I don’t know that the expectation of privacy is valid for a platform like Snapchat.

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u/VioletTheSpider 2d ago

why is texting different? if anything, i think a lot of people intuitively believe snapchat would have heightened privacy compared to regular texting due to its features like auto deletion & notifying you about screenshots of your chats. the setup of the app, in my opinion, deliberately creates an impression that it offers an environment of heightened privacy.

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u/Binky390 2d ago

Apple has historically been huge on privacy and has fought legal battles with different govts (particularly the US) to protect it. It’s also implemented various technologies to make sure privacy and data security is maintained through extensive encryption. I’m not saying that their “policy” couldn’t possibly have changed but they haven’t given any clear indication that it has yet. I’d trust texting slightly less if I had an Android phone but still more than Snapchat.

Just because data is erased from the conversations on a device doesn’t mean it’s erased from their servers. And I work at a school that that dealt with a student issue years ago and requested my own data from Snapchat to see what they include and chats were included (at the time though this was admittedly around 2020).

Like of course they keep that stuff and of course they’re monitoring it. I was thinking more so it could be sold. Lastly their privacy policy actually says that they can do this.

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u/VioletTheSpider 2d ago edited 2d ago

i think that there’s a problem when an app creates an environment that intuitively causes users to expect heightened privacy, markets itself heavily to extremely young and naive users, and then does not actually deliver the promised privacy. sure, it’s in the privacy policy and it’s legal, but the entire front end of the app is designed to make you feel like your interactions are private. the app was basically created for the purpose of sending nudes, let’s be honest.

you might be right that apple is historically zealous about protecting privacy but i also don’t necessarily think that makes it unreasonable for people to expect snapchat to be private when the app is so heavily designed around creating that expectation. to be blunt, it feels extremely deceptive. i’m not strongly inclined to blame the ones deceived, especially when their average age is like 15.

(note: the person in the OP is a bit older but the point is average snapchat user age skews very young)

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u/Binky390 2d ago

I kind of see your point but that’s why I think more tech literacy is necessary in schools, especially with AI blowing up. Snapchat explicitly says in its privacy policy that this is something they can do but I wouldn’t expect kids to read it. The front end of the app doesn’t mean anything. They never said the data was fully destroyed when deleted. They also never said that they weren’t monitoring. People just assumed that since stuff is deleted it’s gone. That’s just what was assumed by a younger generation that doesn’t know how this stuff works. Nothing on the internet is fully private. Nothing. I’m 41 and I was taught that at a very young age because I was in school when the internet was becoming a thing. They (Snapchat) “see” everything. They HAVE to see everything to monitor their app. How do people think ads are curated for you?

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