Snapchat is taking Facebook head on with its jibes on Zuckerberg’s excesses on privacy

• Snap, the company that owns Snapchat, help their first developer conference on Thursday.
• Evan Spiegel, Snap’s CEO, suggests that Snapchat could be the solution to many of the negative aspects around social networking.
• Snap is now curating its own ad network called ‘Snap Audience Network’.
• The company promises to only collect aggregated data, not individual user footprints.

Snap ,the company behind the popular social networking mobile application Snapchat, held its first ever ‘Partner Summit’ on Thursday. This is the first time that the company has hosted its own annual developer conference mimicking the tech giants like Facebook’s F8, Google’s Google I/O and Apple’s WWDC.

At the event, without naming Facebook specifically, Snap CEO — Evan Spiegel — suggested that Snapchat could be a solution to many of the negative aspects of social networking.

Spiegel also told the press that Facebook’s products are damaging society and that Zuckerberg should clean up the mess before investing in the future when asked about Facebook’s new ‘privacy focused’ vision for the company.

It’s not that Snapchat hasn’t had its fair share of issues, especially the privacy concerns around the Snap Map feature, but it has managed to avoid Facebook-like data breaches and the pitfalls around misinformation and fake news.

The tiff between Snapchat and Facebook goes back to when Facebook came out with its own ‘Story’ mode for Instagram. And, now where Snapchat has 186 million daily users, Facebook has 500 million.

Snap Audience Network

One of the biggest issues with Facebook has been that the company has been mining way way too much data on its users and sharing that data with third party applications.

Snapchat indicated that while data may be shared with its partners, it will only ever be aggregated data — not individual user data where users can be identified and their specific patterns can be observed.

But, it hasn’t been as specific about the kind of the data that will be shared or how it will be collected.

For instance, Facebook’s ‘shadow profiles’ collected data from users regardless of whether they had Facebook accounts by third party websites integrating Facebook tracking codes to any user that accessed the site.

Spokespeople at Snapchat expressed that the company is still ironing out those details.

Getting that balance right is probably what can help Snapchat have an edge over its competitors especially with increasing global concerns around privacy implications.

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