You’ve probably broken the law on Snapchat without knowing

With over 100 million daily active users, Snapchat gives you unbridled access to a massive audience from the get go.

However, with such large numbers of people on the app, it’s next to impossible to control who takes a sneaky screenshot of your snaps unless you have your account set to private, which isn’t the way for most of the big users, like YesJulz and other bloggers on the app.

Well, what you might not know is that if you’ve been taking screenshots of your favorite bloggers, friends or just anyone’s posts on the app, you’re treading a fine line with the law.

The UK minister of state for culture, Ed Vaizey, has warned that taking screenshots is soon to be considered the same as copyright infringement and will leave the doors open for users to sue one another in the future.

The minister also specifically mentioned the saving and sharing of photos or videos of a sexual nature. If this is done with intent to cause someone distress, it’s considered an offence and could see the person convicted face up to two years in prison.

Of course, this only applies to incidents where the person who took the photo hasn’t given permission for it to be saved or used elsewhere. A lot of bloggers on the platform ask their followers to screenshot posts about events they are hosting as a way of seeing how many people are interested and this will still be fine.

Snapchat sends notifications when someone screenshots your posts, but anyone who has over 1,000 viewers will tell you how it’s next to impossible to keep track after a while.

The app’s privacy policy states that it doesn’t condone copyright infringement of any type and users who suspect it can report the incident to the company, but it doesn’t say it will remove users who it believes are doing so.

Snapchat could potentially block the option to screenshot posts altogether if it was terribly concerned about copyright.

This might sound a little outlandish but the company sells itself on being ephemeral, so it shouldn’t be a disappointment to anyone if the app was to become just that.

Via Independent