Be smart with your mobile phone pictures

These days there are millions of us, and we don’t need a wedding as an excuse. Everyone’s a self-proclaimed photographer or cameraman, and what we lack in skill we make up for in enthusiasm. Unimaginable amounts of data are generated every day by smartphones, but with this sweeping cultural change, we’re finding ourselves compelled to record moments that are perhaps best left unrecorded. A few weeks ago, X Factor judge Tulisa Contostavlos was the latest celebrity to have pornographic images of herself leaked online — images she had considered private. But this is happening daily to ordinary people; the practice of “sexting” — the sharing of candid, intimate shots — is putting millions of compromising images and videos into the hands of people who might not always look after them.

The scale of the practice is new, but the idea isn’t — the Polaroid camera opened up all kinds of possibilities when it came out in 1948. But today, the process of snapping and sharing takes seconds.

“Sexting” thrives because of that speed: share now, regret later. It also operates on trust, but intimate moments are often fleeting, people can be cruel, and trust can quickly evaporate. The swift, simple mechanic of digital copying is the nemesis of the thoughtless sexter; one copy can become two copies, four copies, hundreds of copies in a matter of minutes. But now, perhaps unsurprisingly, apps are appearing that allow clandestine sharing without associated anxiety.

Snapchat, a free iPhone app, is in some ways a descendent of StealthText, a service that launched about six years ago that allowed your text messages to auto-destruct after a certain period of time; with no digital trail your tracks were covered and your privacy guaranteed. It didn’t catch on — in the internet age we consistently demonstrate that we value convenience over privacy — but maybe Snapchat will.

The idea is that your candid snap is only visible to the recipient for up to 10 seconds; you decide the length of time with each picture you send. After that, the image is no longer accessible by anyone. All traces are eliminated.

As someone who has never felt the urge to send intimate pictures to people I don’t know very well, I’m not sure whether Snapchat will sit ignored on the App Store, or be embraced by millions. But the resulting pictures are highly unlikely to end up — in the words of Tommy Steele — “in the family album”.