A Snapshot at Snapcash

Snapcash

In keeping with the theme of my last post which was about how Domino's didn't need to create a voice ordering function in their app; I have found another app that probably shouldn't have introduced a new feature. For many, Snapchat is the app that you use to send stupid pictures of yourself to your friends. These pictures are deleted from your friends' phones after a certain amount of time. Of course this app isn't used for just taking pictures of your face, and this leads to a lot of controversy when these photos of things other than duck faces are leaked onto the internet.
The idea of using Snapchat to send money to your friends is something that sounds great in theory. Snapchat, which has an estimated user base hovering around 70 million according to Business Insider. The app is also priced somewhere around $2 billion. That's a lot of money for an app that people primarily use to show what they're doing at that exact moment. Now, Snapchat's value is probably going to skyrocket with an influx of users going to it to now pay their friends.

Rationale

I can see why this Snapchat thought that this was a good move. Personally I use an app called Venmo. This app does pretty much what Snapchat is going to do, which is being able to pay your friends over an app. I use this mainly so that I can charge my roommates for things like gas, electricity, cable and internet. As I mentioned before, Snapchat has already been downloaded roughly 70 million times, so there is already a considerable amount of people who are using the app. Adding this new feature means that people don't have to download another app entirely in order to transfer money to their friends; everything is all right there, conveniently on Snapchat. So what's the problem?

Well Snapchat has been hacked before. Millions of private photos and videos have ended up all over the internet for everyone to see. I know what you're thinking, "but how can that be? Don't all of the millions of videos and photos get deleted right after the ten second limit?" Well that's where the fun starts. Turns out, Snapchat was keeping all of your photos and videos after all. In fact, in May of this year they had to settle a charge with the Federal Trade Commission which claimed that Snapchat was deceiving its consumers by telling them that their messages would be deleted. Why should I trust my money with an app that has a propensity for being hacked? I don't want my bank account ending up on the internet with the millions of duck faces that teenagers are taking. It sounds like a great idea to have all of your social needs in one place. You can take a picture of yourself, update your story, and then pay your friends for picking up your drinks at the bar all on one app! 

I personally will not be syncing up my bank account with Snapchat; but hey, maybe I'm being too paranoid about the lack of security that the Snapchat servers have. Maybe I'll be proven wrong and I'll have to uninstall Venmo and switch everything over to Snapchat if everyone else is using it. Then after that, I will probably reply to all of the Nigerian Prince emails in my junk inbox since I clearly don't care about giving my personal banking information out to people whose servers have more holes than a wheel of Swiss cheese. Of course, I could end up eating my words but who knows. 

Sources used in this post:

http://www.cnn.com/2014/01/01/tech/social-media/snapchat-hack/

http://www.businessinsider.com/snapchat-app-downloads-statistics-and-data-2014-5