Snapchat parent shares soar on first quarterly profit

SAN FRANCISCO, United States - Shares in Snap soared on Thursday after the firm behind image-centric, ephemeral messaging app Snapchat reported its first-ever quarter profit.

Shares that had been dragged down by worries about the broader market and concerns about tightened iPhone privacy making it tougher to target ads launched nearly 60 percent on earnings that beat expectations.

Snap ended last year with a loss trimmed to $488 million, and posted a net income of $22.5 million in the final three months of the year.

"2021 was an exciting year for Snap and we made significant progress growing our business and serving our global community," chief executive Evan Spiegel said in an earnings release.

He added that strength in Snap's core business has allowed it to invest in augmented reality, "transforming the way that the Snapchat community experiences the world through our camera."

Snapchat became a hit, particularly with young smartphone users, by letting people share moments in the form of photos or videos in messages that self-destruct after being viewed.

Popular features in the app included "lenses" that allow people to overlay special effects on pictures.

Snap has since redefined itself as a "camera company," launching Spectacles sunglasses that have built in cameras and synch to smartphones.

Snap revenue for the recently ended quarter was $1.3 billion, a 42 percent increase from the same period a year earlier.

"Snapchat ended 2021 on a high note, exceeding our expectations for ad revenue," said Insider Intelligence principal analyst Jasmine Enberg.

"Snapchat is clearly not as prone to the 'TikTok effect' as Meta, with strong daily active user growth in all regions."

Competition from short-form video sharing sensation TikTok helped bruise Facebook-parent Meta, which saw its ranks of daily users shrink for the first time in the final three months of last year.

While Snap earnings felt the sting of supply chain woes and changes to iPhone operating software that make it tougher to target online ads, it was "buoyed by banner quarters" earlier quarters in the year, according to Enberg.

The California-based company says at its website that Snapchat is used daily by an average of 319 million people.

Snap revenue for 2021 was $4.1 billion, up 64 percent from the previous year, according to its earnings report.

Agence France-Presse

OH SNAP! | Hackers expose trove of snagged Snapchat images

SAN FRANCISCO — A huge trove of evidently intercepted Snapchat images and videos were exposed online Friday, raising fears about what may be revealed in messages intended to vanish seconds after beng viewed.

In what was being referred to as “The Snappening,” people who used a third-party program instead of the official Snapchat application had copies of supposedly transient missives squirreled away by hackers who began posting them online late Thursday.

About half of Snapchat users are reported to be 17 years old or younger, raising worries that sexy self-shot images they thought would disappear will be shared on the Internet in what would amount to child pornography.

Snapchat released a statement Friday saying the startup’s servers were not breached, nor were they the source of the leaked images.

The San Francisco-based company maintained that “Snapchatters were victimized” due to the use of outside applications to send or receive “Snaps” in a practice prohibited under the startup’s terms of service.

Outside applications being eyed as sources for purloined Snapchat pictures are designed to let users undermine the intent of the service by keeping copies of self-destructing pictures sent or received.

Malicious apps

Unsanctioned mobile applications that basically hack into Snapchat have apparently been gathering copies of messages for years, storing them at a computer or computers online.

Hackers boasted a 13 gigabyte library of imagery, according to a report at news website Business Insider.

“Anybody who saw all those third-party Snapchat hack apps in the App Store should have seen it coming,” said Nico Sell, founder of encrypted mobile messaging service Wickr and an organizer of the DefCon gathering of hackers annually in Las Vegas.

“You could tell that those were semi-malicious apps.”

That is among reasons Wickr blocks third-party apps from working with the service, and why its messages “see no other computer” than the one they are sent to, according to Sell.

“Technically, it could have been solved,” Sell said of The Snappening.

“It could also be solved by the ecosystem not letting those apps exist.”

Users of anonymity focused online forum 4chan have been downloading the swiped Snapchat messages and are constructing a searchable online archive, Business Insider reported.

The boasted 13 gigabytes of files could equal about a billion low-resolution images, by some estimates.

Snapchat rocketed to popularity, especially among teens, after the initial app was released in September 2011. Created by then Stanford University students, the app allows the sending of messages that disappear shortly after being viewed.

source: interaksyon.com