Thanks to social media, the innocuous act of making silly faces for a picture or talking about an in-joke that only a select few will understand has become fraught with risk. When your picture can be downloaded, viewed and saved — for posterity — on the internet, you will end up being rather restrained with your uploads. Stanford students Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy decided they couldn’t let risk get in the way of self-expression and founded Snapchat in 2011. For a social media app, Snapchat is a curious offering, given that snaps shared through the app self-destruct within a 1-10 second range once the recipient has seen them. Users can send pictures or video to a select list of contacts, who can only see and not save the data, making the app an attractive medium for sending nude pictures or inappropriate gestures. With $370 million in funding, 26 million users and a $3.6 billion valuation, Snapchat doesn’t need to worry about that nuisance value just yet.
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