I’m here at Snap’s annual conference in Santa Monica where the company just announced its biggest redesign to Snapchat in years. You can read more about that below. They keynote is still going and I hear there’s some other big news coming, so stay tuned for more.
Casey Newton shines a light on the increasingly common social media scam that primarily targets teen boys in his most recent Platformer newsletter:
But when a terrifying scam comes along that has led to at least 20 confirmed deaths in the past two years, a whole stack of investigations can’t seem to get a conversation going. [...] Perhaps the surgeon general, instead of his new ham-fisted campaign against every risk that social media presents, could warn parents about this one.
[Platformer]
A deep dive by Rolling Stone tracked the deaths of children who died after taking fake drugs they bought on the app. Parents and law enforcement officials blame, in part, the disappearing messages feature that made Snapchat popular in the first place.
[Rolling Stone]
A small, sparkly ghost logo will “soon” feature on saved or exported images created with Snapchat’s generative AI tools.
More information — including some fairly obvious yet rigorous generative AI dos and don’ts — can be found on Snap’s support page.
Facebook’s “In App Panel” program ran from 2016 to 2019 using Onavo’s technology as a man-in-the-middle attack to decrypt secured Snapchat traffic. Court documents unsealed as part of an ongoing class-action antitrust lawsuit show how the program came together.
A June 2016 email included in the documents from Mark Zuckerberg says:
Whenever someone asks a question about Snapchat, the answer is usually that because their traffic is encrypted we have no analytics about them. . . .
Given how quickly they’re growing, it seems important to figure out a new way to get reliable analytics about them. Perhaps we need to do panels or write custom software. You should figure out how to do this.
The ad-free tier is an experimental feature for Snapchat Plus. It’s not clear when the test launched (Android Police spotted that it was available in Norway as of early September), but we noticed it today when user Jonah Manzano posted on Threads about its availability in Australia. It’s being trialed there at a price of $15.99, over double the standard $5.99 monthly cost of Snapchat Plus.
Investors are reacting positively to my last issue of Command Line, which broke the details of Snap’s internal business goals for next year.
The company’s stock price is up more than 11 percent today thanks to Snap’s “stretch” goal of reaching at least 475 million daily active users next year:
Bernstein analyst Mark Schilsky told Reuters that expectations from the stock are “incredibly low”, but he added, “even I have to admit that the stock would likely be materially higher if they hit this goal.”
That’s one of the things mentioned during the ongoing testimony of former Alameda Research CEO Caroline Ellison against her terrible ex-boyfriend, as well as the idea SBF sought to have regulators “crack down on Binance,” the competing crypto exchange that sparked the run that took FTX down.
You can expect more updates from Wednesday’s events in the Sam Bankman-Fried / FTX fraud trial to come later today.
“The [Information Commissioner’s Office’s] investigation provisionally found the risk assessment Snap conducted before it launched ‘My AI’ did not adequately assess the data protection risks posed by the generative AI technology, particularly to children,” according to the ICO’s notice.
The ICO notes that these are provisional findings, so there’s no enforcement yet or even a guarantee that one will happen. And the ICO says it will “carefully consider any representations from Snap before taking a final decision.”
“We are closely reviewing the ICO’s provisional decision,” Snap spokesperson Russ Caditz-Peck said in a statement. “Like the ICO, we are committed to protecting the privacy of our users. In line with our standard approach to product development, My AI went through a robust legal and privacy review process before being made publicly available. We will continue to work constructively with the ICO to ensure they’re comfortable with our risk assessment procedures.”
Snap launched the My AI chatbot to all users in April.
Update October 6th, 1:28PM ET: Added statement from Snap.
I’m hearing that about 150 employees are being cut as part of a reorganization of Snap’s AR division. Snap’s communications team declined to comment, though I’m expecting more details to be shared tomorrow.
For those who have been following Snap’s business lately, this news shouldn’t necessarily come as a surprise. Even after laying off 20 percent of employees in August 2022, Snap has yet to convince investors that it has the financial discipline to get to sustained profitability. These cuts don’t mean Snap is backing away from its AR strategy, however, I’m told.
Snap wanted to get 4 million people subscribed to its $3.99/month service by the end of 2022. Turns out, it probably happened about 6 months later. The last milestone Snap disclosed was hitting 3 million subscribers in April.
