[ad_1]
IPhone screenshot of Snapchat’s speed filter, which allows users to record and share how fast they move. Snap told NPR it is eliminating the tool. Bobby Allyn / NPR hide caption
toggle caption Bobby Allyn / NPR
IPhone screenshot of Snapchat’s speed filter, which allows users to record and share how fast they move. Snap told NPR it is eliminating the tool.
Bobby Allyn / NPR
The maker of the Snapchat app is removing a feature known as a “speed filter” that allows users to capture the speed at which they move and share it with friends, a spokesperson for the company said. business at NPR.
The move is a dramatic reversal for Snap, Inc., which first introduced the feature in 2013.
Since then, Snap has defended the feature in the face of warnings from security advocates who have argued that it encourages reckless driving. The company has also faced legal action from the families of those injured or killed in car crashes where drivers were traveling at excessive speeds, allegedly to brag about the app.
Critics of the speed filter praised the news, while questioning the timing.
“Lives will be saved. Accidents will be avoided, but the lawyer in me says, ‘My God, why has it taken so long?’” Said Joel Feldman, co-founder of the association at nonprofit End Distracted Driving, which urged Snapchat to remove the speed filter.
It’s unclear what exactly led Snap to remove the feature. For several weeks, NPR asked Snap a series of questions about why it had kept the Speed Filter on for so long. A spokesperson for the company told NPR, “Nothing is more important than the safety of our Snapchat community.”
A month later, the same spokesperson confirmed that the speed filter would be gone soon.
The feature “is hardly used by Snapchatters,” she said Thursday. “And in light of that, we are removing it completely.”
She said the company started removing the feature this week, but it could be a few weeks before it disappears from the app for all of its 500 million monthly active users.
A “speed filter” involved in several fatal car crashes
The feature has been linked to a number of fatal or near fatal car crashes, often with teenagers behind the wheel.
A 2016 crash involving the speed filter left a driver in Georgia with permanent brain damage. That same year, the feature film was linked to the deaths of three young women in a car crash in Philadelphia. Also that year, five people in Florida died in a high-speed collision involving the speed filter. In 2017, three young men from Wisconsin hit a speed of 123 miles an hour before crashing into a tree and dying.
In response, Snap made a number of changes. It moved the speed feature from a “filter” to a “sticker” in Snapchat, reducing its importance. It also added a “Do not hook and drive” warning that would appear whenever someone used the feature. The company also quietly capped the maximum speed that a shift could be shared for “driving speeds” at 35 mph. When NPR asked about it in May, the Snap spokeswoman confirmed the limitation had been imposed. Still, the company refused to simply give up the feature.
And the legal battles continue. Naveen Ramachandrappa, a California lawyer who sued Snap over the speed filter, wrote in a lawsuit that some teenage Snap users believed they would be rewarded with digital prizes and trophies for recording speeds over 100 miles per hour.
“Or at the very least, they want to know if they will be rewarded that way and so they drive at excessive speeds to see what will happen,” he wrote.
A federal appeals court ruled in May that the families of the young men who died in the Wisconsin crash should be able to sue Snap for negligence in designing a product that resulted in foreseeable damage. This week, Snap asked the lower court to dismiss the case, arguing that the speed filter did not cause the car crash.
A Snap spokesperson said that of the roughly 5 billion “Snaps” users created each day, the speed feature is only used by a few thousand, suggesting it was unpopular. .
Irina Raicu, director of the Internet Ethics Program at the University of Santa Clara, said more and more tech companies are conducting risk assessments of new products and features to try and anticipate possible abuse. .
“If you have a new tool or a new feature: what does it do? What is he inviting? And what does he encourage? There are degrees of responsibility based on these three things, ”she said. “This Snapchat filter seems to have missed some of those conversations initially.”
“Sometimes.” Raicu added, “One of the most thoughtful ways to deploy a product is to never deploy it at all.”
[ad_2]
picture credit