Ephemeral Messaging is the developing concept of multimedia communication with a built in expiration date. Messages sent through apps that use ephemeral messaging disappear after a short amount of time, that the users can usually set.
To extend the life of these messages, some of the apps allow you take screenshots, however even that is beginning to fall out of popularity as Confide doesn’t allow screenshots within their app (Confide, Your Confidential Messenger, n.d.). Apps that make use of ephemeral messaging such as Snapchat, Wickr, and Confide are growing in popularity among younger generations (Preece, Roger, & S, and with the eternal conflict between curious and adventurous teens and their parents it’s easy to understand why, but there are potentially larger implications moving into a world with more and more data concerns, and it’s easier to see why more and more are turning to untraced forms of communication. Clearly, the best (and most successful) designs in technology are the ones which fill a need people have, and this trend within technology shows the growing attitude of caution with regards to large corporations and how available your data is to them, both in terms of them selling it, or potentially using it as grounds for denying or terminating employment.
For myself, I can see in today’s current political climate and the state of privacy laws with regards to tech how one’s data could easily be used in a malicious way against them by entities such as the large corporations collecting the data as well as by governments showing a worrying trend towards using private data to track and harass marginalized people. To this point, I hope that the growing popularity of apps that use ephemeral messaging will cause the corporations controlling the more readily available and mainstream forms of communication to reevaluate their policies regarding data collection and what they retain the rights to distribute in the interest of protecting consumers, especially those marginalized by the societies in which they exist.
References
Preece, Rogers, & Sharp, (2015). Interaction Design: Beyond Human Computer Interaction. West Sussex, United Kingdom: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Confide, Your Confidential Messenger, (n.d.) Retrieved from https://getconfide.com/
Interaction Reflections 