Snapchat users share the fury at future costs for the storage of memories

“Half of my life is on this application and now they expect what we pay for it.”

Critics of a star and a feeling of injustice dominated online discussion since the Snapchat popular messaging application has become the last technological company to put a price on a service that people liked to use for free.

The parent company of the SNAP application announced in September that it would start to invoice people if they have more than five gigabytes of previously shared images and videos recorded as souvenirs.

For many, these retro publications act as a window on the past – which has led some to accuse the “business greed” firm in publications on social networks and negative criticisms on Google and Apple application stores.

Snap compared its storage plans paid to those provided by Apple and Google for smartphones.

And as an alternative for those who do not want to pay, users can download their memories, which for some dozen gigabytes of data, on their device.

The company told the BBC that only a small number of users would be affected by the changes.

He also admitted that it was “never easy to go from the reception of a free service to pay for this” – but suggested that this was worth “the cost” for users.

Many criticizing the online move seem to disagree.

An online petition has nicknamed the “memory tax” costs, with commentators calling it “dystopian” and “ridiculous” – while a person threatened to never use the application again.

Meanwhile, in a review of a star on the Google Play Store, a person called Natacha Jonsson said that it was “very contrary to ethics”.

“If I know the millennials well, most of us have years of memories on Snapchat,” they said.

“And most of us have kept the application only for this reason.

“5 GB is absolutely nothing when you have years of memories … Bye snap.”

And Guste Ven, a 20 -year -old journalism student in London, shared Tiktok her plans to remove the application.

“I decided that I had to download all my memories as soon as possible,” she told BBC News.

“Almost all my years of adolescence have been documented through my Snapchat memories, all the photos are really important to me.

“It just doesn’t make sense to start billing people for something that has been free for so many years.”

Snapchat has not yet said to what extent storage plans would cost in the United Kingdom – only that they are part of a “progressive global deployment”.

But Amber Daley, 23, who also lives in London, said in an article on Tiktok, she would be “distraught” by such accusations.

Amber told the BBC that the application had become “part of daily life” since it had started using it in 2014.

Although she said she understood that the platform needed to earn money, Amber suggested that the functionality of memories means more for users than the company would have achieved it.

“I think it is an unfair decision to charge for your customers who have been loyal and dedicated,” she said.

“These are not only memories, these are our real memories.”

Companies deciding to invoice users a service that was previously free is nothing new, and millions pay services like iCloud and Google Drive to save their photos and videos from their smartphone.

The reality of data storage in the cloud – that some in the technology industry like to simply call “someone else’s computer” – does it cost money.

“Hosting billions of memories on Snapchat is not a trivial amount,” said Matt Navarra, the social media consultant at the BBC.

“Snapchat must try to find a way to cover the cost of storage, bandwidth, backups, content delivery, encryption – all that.”

But Mr. Navarra said that the introduction of costs for a service that had previously been free, and that users had been encouraged to use it as such, can feel like a “bait and a change” for some.

“Move the goal posts after people have built this huge digital archive is not really suitable,” he said.

And for many, he added, “memories are not only data emptying, they are emotional artifacts”.

The feeling was shared by those who left critical criticism, a person calling his snapchat photos and videos “The most precious thing for me”.

“(Souvenirs) have all the aspects of my life in them births to the births of new family members, mourning dear beings, memories with friends / family, (and) of all my adolescence,” they wrote.

Dr. Taylor Annabell, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, said that the Snapchat decision shows the implications of the commercial platforms used to store sentimental personal content.

“They benefit from this trust, this interdependence and this endless presumption of access, which even encourages some users to stay with the platform or continue to use it in order to scroll through their archives,” she told the BBC.

“But they are not benevolent guards of personal memory.”