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The Snappening pictures have leaked, but those downloading could fall foul of child pornography laws

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By Ishbel Macleod, PR and social media consultant

October 13, 2014 | 1 min read

As predicted on Friday by users of 4chan, thousands of images of Snapchat users have been posted online, with a site sharing 13GB of images going live on Saturday 11 October.

However, given the young nature of Snapchat’s audience, those who download the files could be at risk of child pornography laws.

The photos were not leaked through Snapchat itself, but rather through a third party site called Snapshaved.com, which appears to have maliciously saved the login details of users and stored the photos and videos that were posted.

Snapchat grew to popularity for its use of self-deleting pictures: perhaps the reason that so many young people felt safe sending nude image over the channels.

However, a host of third party apps allow users to ‘save’ images that are sent to them without the knowledge of the sender.

This latest leak has seen 200,000 images posted online, although people who have seen the pictures have suggested that they are not all nudes, and in fact most just see users showing off new clothes or food.

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