Snapchat app has made over 5000 requests in the past 24h

9 points by eyegor 6y ago ↗ HN

This is new behavior I've noticed from the android app. During the 24h period it accumulated over 5000 requests (on one device!) to chat-gateway-prod.chat.snapchat.com and app-analytics.snapchat.com. During this time, I didn't use the app at all. Noticing this behavior, I decided to open the app and take a glorious screenshot of my dns requests to their analytics domain: https://ibb.co/NyTLbfX, it immediately made 28 requests over the course of 6 minutes, averaging one every 12 seconds. I didn't interact with it at all, I just opened the app and waited a few minutes.

If anyone who reads this bumps into someone that works on the snapchat team, can they look into this? This is the sketchy sort of behavior where I go into work and black hole all your domains across [redacted large number of] employees.

3 comments

[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 14.9 ms ] thread

NHQ 6y ago ↗

No, snapchat doesn't care, dude.

sifer 6y ago ↗

If you have the app open, they’re clearly gonna have background tasks running to collect data/usage stats. That’s no surprise. 5000/hr is about 3.5/minute. Sounds perfectly normal for a tracking/advertising app like Snapchat. If you don’t like it just quit the app

Nextgrid 6y ago ↗

The main purpose of the app is to be spyware. The messaging & photo-taking aspect of it is secondary and is just there to give you a reason to install the spyware. If they could get people to install it without those features they wouldn't even bother developing them.

The same applies for most "free" apps (especially social media) and the reason why I don't use nor recommend anyone else uses them. I've tried hard to accept the nasty behaviour as a trade-off of the functionality the app provides but the downside always outweighed the upside.