21st Century Learning and Teaching

As it turned out, site called Snapsaved.com seems to have been the source of some of the leak. The developer, whose identity still isn't known, in a Facebook update and over the weekend confirmed it was the source after its servers were hacked -- but said only 500 MB was stolen.

In any case, Snapchat was off the hook and in a blogpost yesterday addressing the issue, the start-up warned users about the "unfortunate threats these third-party applications can pose to our community."

"Unfortunately, these applications often ask for Snapchat login credentials and use them to send or receive snaps and access account information," it said.

"When you give your login credentials to a third-party application, you're allowing a developer, and possibly a criminal, to access your account information and send information on your behalf."

While some companies like Twitter and Facebook make their APIs available for other developers, as one developer told The Verge this week, Snapchat does not. The company says in its terms that developers can't use it without its prior written consent. The advantage of providing a public API would be that third-party apps have their own authentication token, which Snapchat could revoke if they do something wrong.

In Snapchat's case though, the fact that it doesn't have a public API hasn't stopped dozens of developers reverse engineering the Snapchat protocol to create their own apps.

Learn more:

- http://gustmees.wordpress.com/2014/03/05/often-asked-questions-are-there-cyber-security-dangers-with-apps-and-whats-about-privacy/