Oh Snap
Hello,
Sometimes understanding data transfer in the real world can be a challenge. It all boils down to how much control of your own data do you really have in our digital lives? Here’s a quick story that makes it real.
Snapchat – that funky messaging and photo app popular with the under 40 crowd – enables people to share disappearing photos and videos, often run through funny filters that make you look like a dog or an angry old lady. For many folks, it’s a fun, silly way to share bits of their lives with friends while retaining a sense of control. They can keep the photos and videos of happy times – what Snapchat calls Memories – but the recipients do not. Until now, all those Memories people gathered were stored on Snapchat free of charge. That’s all changing. Now these memories could start disappearing for the sender as well.
Snapchat recently announced users will only be able to store up to 5GB of those photo and video Memories for free. After that, they will have to pay for extra storage, much like Apple and Google charge with their cloud storage services. Snapchat users will get 12 months to sort out if they want to pay an as yet unannounced fee for an additional 100GB, 250GB, or 5TB of storage. As you can imagine, people aren’t happy about having to soon pay for something they’ve been getting for free. Especially when it comes to keeping the digital memories of some of their most nostalgic, sentimental, happy times.
Many Snapchat users now have a choice to make. Pay up and keep adding memories as long as they can afford it. Or spend time figuring out how to download all those memories to their device and save those locally. For some people, it won’t be a big deal to pay up to get more storage. For others, it won’t be a big deal to download everything to their computer and keep all their memories there. But for other folks, they might not be able to afford the extra money to keep all their memories on Snapchat. Or, they might not own a device with enough storage to keep all those memories close to home.
There’s two sides to this coin, right? Snapchat says they have trillions of people’s photos and videos stored on their servers, and we all know that data storage costs money. So it is not surprising that Snapchat doesn’t want to keep footing the bill for all our photos and videos. Google and Apple felt the same and we all took that in stride, for the most part.
The other side of this coin though is users feel like the goal posts got moved on them. Snapchat encouraged them to share all their chats, photos, and videos and store them on the platform and that kept them coming back to Snapchat, which in turn made the company billions of dollars in ad revenue. Now users have their personal lives saved on Snapchat and they’re being asked to pay up or move out. It’s a good reminder that as a Snapchat user, you don’t control all your data.
Here’s the kicker though, and here’s where data transfer comes in and where Snapchat falls short. Yes, users can either pay up (if they can afford it) or download their memories to their own device (if they have their own one with enough storage space). What Snapchat users can’t do easily is transfer all those memories to another service and store them there. Maybe they already pay for Apple iCloud storage and want to keep it simple and put everything there. There is no easy way to do that. Yes, they could download their memories to their device and reupload them to the iCloud. But that’s not easy – it’s time consuming, it’s tedious, it takes a certain level of technical knowledge.
Here’s what we want to see. Snapchat, you moved the goal posts on your users. That’s your right as a company, you can change your business model whenever you want. But you didn’t give your users an easy, effective off ramp to take their memories somewhere else by offering them good data transfer tools. This is a failure on your part. The good news is, it’s one that’s not that hard to fix.
Our lives are online these days. All those photos, videos, chats – memories – exist under someone else’s control. If we want to keep control of our lives – our memories — we need the ability to transfer that data where we want, when we want, because companies can always move the goal posts. We need the ability to move too.
Jen Caltrider
Data Transfer Initiative Data Transfer Initiative