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An iPhone screengrab of Snapchat's speed filter, which allows users to record and share how fast they are moving. Snap told NPR that it is eliminating the tool. Bobby Allyn/NPR hibernate explanation

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Bobby Allyn/NPR

An iPhone screengrab of Snapchat'southward speed filter, which allows users to record and share how fast they are moving. Snap told NPR that it is eliminating the tool.

Bobby Allyn/NPR

The maker of the Snapchat app is eliminating a characteristic known as the "speed filter" that lets users capture how fast they are moving and share it with friends, NPR has learned.

The move is a dramatic reversal for Snap, Inc., which introduced the feature in 2013.

Since then, Snap has dedicated the feature in the face of warnings from safety advocates who take argued that information technology encourages reckless driving. The company has also faced lawsuits from the families of those who have been injured or killed in car crashes where drivers were moving at excessive speeds, allegedly to score bragging rights on the app.

Critics of the speed filter welcomed the news, while also questioning the delay.

"Lives will be saved. Crashes volition be prevented, but the lawyer in me says, 'My God, why did information technology have so long?' " said Joel Feldman, the co-founder of the nonprofit End Distracted Driving, ane of the groups that urged Snapchat to remove the speed filter.

What exactly led Snap to chip the feature at present is unclear. Over several weeks, NPR asked Snap a series of questions virtually why information technology had stood by the speed filter for so long. A company spokeswoman told NPR, "Nothing is more important than the safety of our Snapchat community."

A calendar month afterward, the same spokeswoman confirmed the speed filter would presently be gone.

The feature "is barely used by Snapchatters," she said on Thursday. "And in light of that, we are removing it altogether."

She said the company started removing the feature this calendar week, but it may be a couple weeks before information technology disappears from the app for all of its 500 1000000 monthly agile users.

Lawyer Michael Neff, who has represented the families of those involved in car crashes linked to the filter, said the change does non undo the pain of his clients.

"While this will no doubt serve the condom of the motoring public moving forward, it does not remedy Snapchat'south choice to create and distribute the speed filter in the past," Neff said. "Nosotros look forrard to our day in court and pursuing justice for those who suffered unnecessary losses."

'Speed filter' involved in several deadly car crashes

The feature has been connected to a number of mortiferous or near-fatal machine crashes, often with teenagers backside the bike.

A 2015 collision involving the speed filter left a driver in Georgia with permanent encephalon damage. That same yr, the feature was tied to the death of iii immature women in a Philadelphia car blow. In 2016, v people in Florida died in a high-speed collision that reportedly involved the speed filter. In 2017, iii young men in Wisconsin clocked a speed of 123 miles per hour on the feature before they crashed into a tree and died.

In response, Snap made a number of changes. Information technology moved the speed feature from a "filter" to a "sticker" in Snapchat, lowering its prominence. It too added a "Don't Snap and drive" warning that would announced every time someone used the feature. The visitor also quietly capped the acme speed for which a post could exist shared for "driving speeds" at 35 mph. When NPR inquired about this in May, the Snap spokeswoman confirmed that the limitation had been imposed. Even so the company kept the filter available for utilize.

And the legal battles continue. Naveen Ramachandrappa, a California lawyer who sued Snap over the speed filter, wrote in a lawsuit that some teenage users of Snap believed they would be rewarded with digital prizes and trophies for recording a speed in backlog of 100 miles per hour.

"Or at the very least, they want to discover out if they will be so rewarded and so they drive at excessive speeds to encounter what will happen," he wrote.

A federal appeals court in May ruled that the family of the young men who died in the Wisconsin crash should exist able to sue Snap for being negligent in designing a production that led to foreseeable impairment. Snap this week asked the trial court to toss the example out, arguing the speed filter did non cause the car accident.

Of the some v billion "snaps" users make every mean solar day, the speed characteristic barely registers in terms of popularity, which is why Snap officials say information technology is dropping the tool.

Irina Raicu, the director of the Internet Ethics Program at Santa Clara University, said that increasingly, tech companies are doing risk assessments of new products and features to endeavor to get alee of possible abuses.

"If yous accept a new tool or characteristic: What does it permit? What does information technology invite? And what does information technology incentivize? In that location are degrees of responsibility based on those iii things," she said. "This Snapchat filter seems like maybe information technology was missing some of those conversations initially."

"Sometimes," Raicu added, "one of the most thoughtful means to deploy a production is to never deploy information technology at all."

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Source: https://www.npr.org/2021/06/17/1007385955/snapchat-ends-speed-filter-that-critics-say-encouraged-reckless-driving

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