Want Those Snapchats Back? That'll Be $300

By Chris Taylor2013-05-09 19:14:29 -0700

In the digital world, few things are ever truly deleted or destroyed. Not if you have the money to get them back.

That's why one company is making hay out of a new service Thursday that offers to recover Snapchats — those supposedly self-destructing pics beloved by teens and twentysomethings — from the recipient's phone. For a cool $300 to $500 per device.

The utility is obvious: this pricey service is for lawsuits, for seriously disapproving (and well-off) parents, and quite possibly for blackmail purposes. Our only question: what took them so long?

For now, the service is only available for Android phones. But the company in question, Utah-based Decipher Forensics, is working feverishly to add iOS capability. Which, considering that most of the 150 million Snapchats sent per day hail from iPhones, is where the real money is.

SEE ALSO Snapchat CEO: Delete is the Default

The fact that it works is no fault of Snapchat itself, which does delete your pics from its servers the second it sends them out. And it does delete the picture on the recipient's phone so thoroughly that you can't even get at it with root access to the device.

What it can't do is overwrite all the spare space on your device. So unless its hard drive is very close to full, or the snapchat was sent a long time ago, chances are a painstaking digital detective is going to be able to reconstruct the photo from all those free-floating 1s and 0s.

"The average person cannot turn on their phone and find these pictures," admits Decipher Forensics in its press release — which rather belies its attention-grabbing title, "Decipher Forensics Exposes that Snapchats are Actually Saved on Your Phone."

In other words, what this company is offering is similar to the service you'll get at an established data retrieval company such as Drive Savers, which retrieves digital information from damaged computers in clean rooms over a period of days or weeks.

The only question in both cases is: how much is the data worth to the recipient?

So think carefully, snapchatters, before you send that next shot. Consider whether it is so outrageous, or so illegal, that your recipient might consider ponying up the cash to preserve it for all time.

Image via iStockphoto, greg801

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