Let’s face it, staying invisible online is hard. It’s almost impossible to network for your career without Facebook and Twitter at least, and there are probably other online services you use too.
The problem is, all these require handing over data, and it’s not always well protected.
Images courtesy: Reuters
It’s a sort of understanding, that you hand your data over to social media companies and they’re going to use it for ads or whatever. At the very least though, you’d expect them to take care of that data. And maybe you can trust them to, but can you also trust the thousands of people working for them? Apparently not always.
It’s just come to light that some Snapchat employees are the untrustworthy kind. According to two former Snap (the company that owns Snapchat) employees that spoke to Motherboard, there were instances of spying happening right in the office.
It seems “multiple” employees at the company several years ago improperly accessed user data on the service. Yep, they abused their privileges to access details about customers outside of official reasons why they would need them.
The thing is, Snapchat has internal tools that grant employees access to personal information like location data, saved photos and videos on the app, phone numbers, and email addresses. And it looks like some people there abused this tool at least a “few times”.
One of these tools is called SnapLion, which was originally designed to let the company access user data in case law enforcement demanded it. It’s only accessible by the Spam and Abuse team, Customer Operations, and security. Apparently some employees used this to look up users’ email addresses.
Snap hasn’t yet commented on whether any action was taken against said employees, and whether they now have a precaution in place to prevent it. Either way, it’s a harsh wake up call for those of you that still somehow thought these companies keep your data safe.
Even with all the security measures in the world, your privacy is only as safe as a someone with access and questionable ethics.