A co-founder of Snapchat has denied that his app encourages children to exchange explicit photographs on their phones.
CEO Evan Spiegel said users were more likely to send innocent “selfies” than offensive material.
Spiegel, 23, speaking on his first visit to London, rejected accusations about the app, which lets users share photos that self-destruct within 10 seconds.
The app is used predominantly by people aged 13 to 25, but he said it would be “silly” to assume that children were not going to use smartphone applications and that the best way of protecting them was for parents to use the apps themselves.
“It’s important to build trust with people in your family and obviously there are all sorts of parental monitoring tools for parents who are uncomfortable with their children using their cell phones,” he said.
“Going online is not all that different from hanging out in the park with your friends.”
Spiegel co-founded the company in Los Angeles with Bobby Murphy, 25, two years ago and it has since been valued at £500 million, with more than 400 million photo messages exchanged every day.
Of his visit to the capital, he said: “It’s pretty clear that London has a lot of creative energy from what I’ve seen, I’m excited to check it out. We’ve seen really incredible growth of the product here, we’re on 25 per cent of smartphones in the UK, so it seemed like a perfect time to see what’s going on.”
When asked whether more restrictions should be put in place on the use of the app, he said: “We see really high volumes of traffic during the day when people are in school or at work and that indicates to us that people probably don’t have their pants off in the office and therefore that the vast majority of traffic is communicative.”
He admitted he had “no idea” that the company would prove to be such a success, adding: “Initially, there was kind of a lot of confusion — ‘why would you share something that disappears unless it’s really bad?’ — or something like that.
“Snapchat is about changing the way that people think about photos. Traditionally, photos have been about saving a memento, framing a moment for ever. With Snapchat, because the content disappears, photos become communication.”
Spiegel said he would not consider selling Snapchat because the concept had only reached “one per cent” of its potential, but would consider a stock-market flotation if it was in the company’s “best interests”.
