This week, the news that some enterprising (read: horrifyingly creepy) hacker stole as many as 100,000 images and videos from users of the disappearing photo app Snapchat sent waves of fear all over the internet – especially as explicit pictures of children were rumoured to have been part of that 13.6GB. If that wasn’t creepy enough, a quick look into the stats shows just how dark ‘the Snappening’ really is.
Snapchat – who have completely distanced themselves from the scandal, blaming security breaches on third-party apps able to access user’s photos – have already said that 50 per cent of its users are between 13 and 17 years old, meaning that there’s a good chance that pictures of children have been stolen and distributed (potentially of a sexually explicit nature).
But now ‘the Snappening username list’ has been published which – if authentic – gives us an indicator of who has been targeted by the Snappening. No big surprise: it’s mostly women.
The list itself contains 402 names, which is obviously just a sample of the 200,000 accounts estimated to have been affected by the Snappening, but it looks like 49% have typically female-sounding handles, compared to 28% typically male and 23% unknown.
We also found that of those users who had more than ten files stolen, an enormous 87% were female compared to 13% male, meaning that not only were women more likely to be targeted, they were also more likely to have a bigger back catalogue of images stolen and published without their consent. What’s more, if username suffixes like ‘98’ or ‘99’ are to be believed, we can say that 14 of the users were underage.
If we take the list to be a representative sample, it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to say that the vast majority of pictures shared in the Snappening were stolen from girls – a significant number of whom are under 18. One of the girls on the list had 290 of her images stolen and released. Grim doesn’t even begin to describe it.
READ MORE: Why The Snappening Is So Much Worse Than Digital Chlamydia
Grim or not, it hasn’t been enough to deter a whole bunch of Reddit users from bemoaning the fact that the images are no longer available for them to gawp at. In a SubReddit called ‘the Snappening’, users have been lambasting the ‘internet asshole’ who hasn’t made the pictures easier to access. Nice. Even nicer, the SubReddit has become the home for many users to victim blame, with one even saying ‘like it was thesnappening.org’s fault that some idiots downloaded an unsafe 3rd party app that posted their pics online. Puh-lease.’
Links which direct users to websites where they can still view the images never seem to be taken down, which is a pretty bleak indication of how seriously the administrators of the SubReddit was taking the Snappening.
In another thread, users were even making specific requests to access pictures of women they know, with one Redditor called sameterror posting:
‘A girl from my class has 35 pictures in the leak. Her username was in 35 of the few identified snaps. Dont want to download the 13 GB which may contain CP, but am wondering if anyone that has dowloaded it, can check up her pics for me?’
For those who claim the Snappening is only the Snapchat user’s own fault for taking risks with their Smartphone, just for a minute imagine what it would feel like to have a picture – intended as a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it surprise for one of your real friends – gawped at, not only by strangers, but by that creepy weirdo you have to see in your class every single day. Not nice, is it?
Like this? You might also be interested in:
The Fourth Wave of the Fappening Hits and Claims it’s First Male Victim
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.