For Evan Spiegel, the hardest words to say seem to be, “I’m sorry.”
An article on Mashable has stated that Snapchat’s CEO appeared on NBC’s Today on Friday in a pre-taped interview with Carson Daly to discuss the New Year’s Eve security breach, which resulted in 4.6 million usernames and phone numbers leaking online. Spiegel was visibly frustrated by the hack — Daly described him as “outraged” — but the CEO still did not offer an apology to users.
“Technology businesses in general are susceptible to hacking,” Spiegel said in the interview. “That’s why you have to work really, really, really hard with law enforcement, with security experts, internal and external groups, to make sure you’re paying attention and addressing security concerns.”
As Daly points out in the interview, however, Snapchat had been warned by a security group of potential risks just days before the breach occurred; in fact, it may have been months ago. Snapchat played down the threat.
“You know, I believe at the time we thought we had done enough,” Spiegel said. “But I think in a business like this, in a business that’s moving so quickly, if you spend your time looking backwards you are just going to kill yourself.”
Spiegel’s comments in the interview were similar to a statement released by Snapchat on Thursday night in which the company promised to release an update that would let users opt out of appearing in the Find Friends feature, which was used to leak user details.
“Find Friends is an optional service that asks Snapchatters to enter their phone number so that their friends can find their username,” the company wrote in a blog post. “We will be releasing an updated version of the Snapchat application that will allow Snapchatters to opt out of appearing in Find Friends after they have verified their phone number.”