Te Kete o Karaitiana Taiuru (Blog)

Snapchat the new Indigenous IP thief

Snapchat is the latest social media company to claim Intellectual Property Rights with your data, pics and info including your voice and facial recognition.

Under these Terms of Service, if you had recorded your elder sending family a message does so in a traditional chant, wearing traditional clothes and accessories and the face has traditional tattoo, Snapchat could claim ownership of the video and use it for an advert for snapchat or one of its partners could use it for advertising.

The latest Terms of Service Effective: October 28, 2015 https://www.snapchat.com/terms are a wake up call for anyone who uses snapchat thinking it is a safe and anonymous social media tool.

2. Your Content

Many of our Services let you create, upload, post, send, receive, and store content. When you do that, you retain whatever ownership rights in that content you had to begin with.

But you grant Snapchat a worldwide, perpetual, royalty-free, sublicensable, and transferable license to host, store, use, display, reproduce, modify, adapt, edit, publish, create derivative works from, publicly perform, broadcast, distribute, syndicate, promote, exhibit, and publicly display that content in any form and in any and all media or distribution methods (now known or later developed). We will use this license for the limited purpose of operating, developing, providing, promoting, and improving the Services; researching and developing new ones; and making content submitted through the Services available to our business partners for syndication, broadcast, distribution, or publication outside the Services. Some Services offer you tools to control who can—and cannot—see your content under this license. For more information about how to tailor who can watch your content, please take a look at our privacy policy and support site.

To the extent it’s necessary, you also grant Snapchat and our business partners the unrestricted, worldwide, perpetual right and license to use your name, likeness, and voice in any and all media and distribution channels (now known or later developed) in connection with any Live Story or other crowd-sourced content you create, upload, post, send, or appear in. This means, among other things, that you will not be entitled to any compensation from Snapchat or our business partners if your name, likeness, or voice is conveyed through the Services.

While we’re not required to do so, we may access, review, screen, and delete your content at any time and for any reason, including if we think your content violates these Terms. You alone though remain responsible for the content you create, post, store, or send through the Services.

We always love to hear from our users. But if you volunteer feedback or suggestions, just know that we can use your ideas without compensating you.

While at this stage private snapchats that expire and are deleted from your account will be deleted from the snapchat servers (at this stage and depending on backups, lag and synchronising) any snapchat you save will be vulnerable to SnapChat changing their Terms of Service. Who has time to read TOS for the multiple social media services? Aleecia M. McDonald and Lorrie Faith Cranor 2008 state it would take 244 hours of reading. Considering that there are a lot more online services now in 2015 than 2008, this would be a lot longer, maybe double?

Another issue for Snapchat users is in the Terms of Use section 10.
..
Any software that we provide you may automatically download and install upgrades, updates, or other new features. You may be able to adjust these automatic downloads through your device’s settings.

Does this mean Snapchat can install spyware or create cloud back ups of your data?

Snapchat have tried to down play the seriousness of the update in their blog post on November 01 2015 , but if you read paragraph 3 of the Blog it makes the rest of the post irrelevant and justifies the concerns of users.

I would also suggest that if you use snapchat, be prepared for your images to appear on Google and on multiple other international web sites as is the case already for a number of Māori in intimate and other various poses already.

Note: If you are a victim of cyber bullying from people, please contact Net Safe.

DISCLAIMER: This post is the personal opinion of Dr Karaitiana Taiuru and is not reflective of the opinions of any organisation that Dr Karaitiana Taiuru is a member of or associates with, unless explicitly stated otherwise.

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