Snapchat's Evan Spiegel will be featured as the headline and cover of Forbes' annual 30 Under 30 List of the top young entrepreneurs of our time. The accolade for Spiegel comes at a unique time as the company is currently under fire for leaving an opening in its security that left 4.6 million user names and phone numbers vulnerable to attack. Someone has since posted those user names and numbers (with the last two digits omitted) and posted them in an online database.
Snapchat is obviously hoping to get the public through this controversy and focus the image of the company back on the one Forbes will be highlighting in its Jan. 20 issue. In order to make this happen, the Venice Beach-based company has enlisted lobbyist firm Heather Podesta + Partners to help with communications. Snapchat will work with the firm toward "educating policymakers regarding the application's operation and practice," according to the lobbying disclosure.
USA Today reports that the hiring of the lobbyist comes as privacy experts called for an investigation from the Federal Trade Commission, which could levy fines.
The mess began when Snapchat disclosed in a blog post last month that a security firm had discovered vulnerabilities in its Find Friends feature that would allow people to upload contact lists to Snapchat. The company said it had implemented safeguards making this exploit very difficult to do. However, it was not impossible and the company soon saw an entire database of its users information, which it had failed to keep safe, published online.
Snapchat allows its users to send and receive videos and pictures for a short period of time (up to ten seconds) before they delete from the user's phone entirely. The app has taken off so much in the social spectrum that fellow social media giant, Facebook, offered Spiegel and the company $3 billion to sell after Facebook's similar "Poke" app was unsuccessful. Believe it or not, Snapchat refused the offer amid multiple bids. Some of those bids have valued the start-up at close to $4 billion.
While Spiegel is hardly an untested company owner, this latest security controversy will be his first public test. He caught some flak earlier last week for not apologizing for the published database, but it's possible that admitting fault could have been a specific no-no laid out by his new team of lobbyists.
