If you’re not familiar, Snapchat is an app that lets you send a text to someone that is supposed to self-destruct after a certain period of time. I am not a fan.  I’ve written about what has come to be known as the “sexting app” for EBONY.com on a couple of different occasions (you can check them out here and here), and the takeaway from each article has been that ultimately, there is no way to permanently delete anything once you’ve put it out there. There have always been at least two or three different ways to get around that whole “self-destruct” feature, but now a new app makes it even easier to keep texts and photos forever.

Enter Snaphack, an app that allows you to save texts that someone sends from the Snapchat app. The key here is that the sender will never know that you are keeping a permanent record of the communication. Here’s how Snaphack works: once the app is installed, when someone sends you a Snapchat, you open it in the Snaphack app instead of using Snapchat itself. The sender will never know you used a different app to view their message and they won’t get any sort of notification that their message has been saved. An update coming this month to the Snaphack app will allow you to email texts or photos that you’ve saved to other Snapchat users. The app costs 99 cents and is currently only available for iPhone, with an Android version coming soon.

I’ve said it many times before and I’ll keep shouting from the mountaintops that “what happens on the Internet, stays on the Internet forever!” Even in this age of oversharing, there are still lots of unwanted and sometimes irreversible consequences to sharing too much information with the wrong people online. Those seemingly harmless pictures you send today could come back to haunt you tomorrow, and it’s important to understand that there really isn’t much you can do about it. So please think twice before you send that next Snapchat – Snaphack and other apps like it make those moments you thought were temporary last forever.

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