Wednesday, October 15, 2014

Snapchat: Third Party Apps A Threat To Community

Venice, California-based instant messaging app developer Snapchat--in light of the massive breach of compromising photos leaked from the service via an unauthorized, third party service---reiterated Tuesday that third party apps are a threat to the community. The company--which says it hasn't provided a public API due to the time and resources to "build an open and trustworthy third-party application ecosystem"--said that giving login credentials to third party applications allows developers--and "possibly a criminal" access to account information. Snapchat also said it has been asking Apple and Google to take down third party applications that are accessing its API without its permission. Those third party apps are using the unpublished, private API -- which had been easily back engineered by developers -- to pull data down directly from Snapchat, using user login information. The massive leak of compromising photos from Snapchat is being called "The Snappening" among Internet websites.

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