Snap also managed to grow its revenue by 50 percent from the same quarter last year, making $446 million over the previous $296 million. Overall, though, the company is still not profitable, reporting a loss of $227 million in Q3 2019. That’s still an improvement from the $323 million it lost in the same period last year.

In prepared remarks accompanying the results, CEO Evan Spiegel attributed the user growth to “the value we provide to our community.” These include things like “a mobile content platform, an augmented reality platform, a social map, and most recently, a new gaming platform,” he added. Snap has continued to add media partners to its Discover platform, which now sees more than 10 million monthly viewers in Q3 across 100 channels.

Much of the user growth in the past two quarters also has to do with the company redesigning its Android app. Spiegel noted that Snapchat is now “more performant on a wider variety of devices,” helping the company “substantially increase the rate at which we onboard new Android users.”

This quarter, the company also announced its new hardware product, the Spectacles 3. These build upon the video-recording glasses by focusing on adding AR effects to the footage captured. They also target a different audience, and are meant for creators and 3D artists rather than your average Snapchatter. They won’t be available for the mass market, though. In his prepared remarks, Spiegel said “We are building low volumes of Spectacles 3 and using this iteration to test and learn more about wearable computing.” He also called the device “an important step forward towards an augmented reality future.”

Spiegel spelled out what Snap will be working on in the next decade. Within the next three years, the company wants to make it easier to create and monetize Snapchat and AR content. In the next three to five years, it plans to keep improving and scaling, and find ways to monetize its maps and gaming platforms.

Finally, over the next seven to ten years, the company wants to “realize our vision of computing overlaid on the world through wearable augmented reality.” Clearly, AR glasses will play a large role in the latter part of that vision. Snap has yet to turn a profit, but at least the company has now shared some plans on where it expects to bring its business in the years to come, which should provide investors some clarity. Spiegel will be answering questions on today’s earnings call, and we’ll be listening to see if he has any other details to share and will update this post with anything we hear.

In total, Motherboard spoke to four former employees and a current employee that verified the existence of the SnapLion tool. Two former employees said that the abuse of the SnapLion tool occurred “several years” ago, but it’s unknown whether it’s still happening today. Emails obtained by Motherboard revealed an employee using the tool to look-up a user email address in a non-law enforcement related context. Snapchat did not immediately respond to a request from Engadget for comment.

What stands out in the case of Snapchat is how easily employees across multiple departments were able to use the SnapLion tool for unrelated, internal purposes, such as handling spam and abuse on the platform. But such an internal tool isn’t unique to Snapchat, neither is abuse of private data by employees. Facebook fired a security engineer last year for using personal data to stalk women. Uber’s use of a “God View” tool that revealed rider’s location prompted an investigation by the New York State Attorney General. Both companies responded by promising stricter privacy controls; in the case of Facebook, the employee in question was fired. Snap, Inc. hasn’t confirmed whether the abuse has actually occurred, but tell Motherboard such abuse would result in termination.

In the festival’s Arcade section, which is full of eye-catching installations and people wearing headsets, Stealing ur feelings is easy to miss. It consists simply of a 46-inch display mounted onto a pillar in the middle of the aisle separating the exhibits in the long rectangular room. There’s a camera above the screen and a button below it to start the video, with minimal signage explaining the project.

When you’re ready to experience Stealing ur feelings, hit the button and the video begins. The presenter begins his fast-paced, upbeat spiel while a mix of stock images and clips of people using Snapchat appear on-screen. A few seconds into the film, you see your face along with an explanation of how the computer picks out features like your eyes and mouth to understand if you’re smiling, frowning or neutral. Throughout, the narrator verbally pummels you with revelation after revelation about what the film asserts companies are doing. Things like using your smartphone camera to watch you as you’re scrolling through your Facebook feed, for instance, and determine how you react to what you see.

It doesn’t just suggest possibilities, either. The video highlights patents filed by Snap, Apple and Facebook that show diagrams and registration numbers with detailed descriptions of how these companies can score your mood based on your facial expression.

It’s worth noting that big companies like Snap, Facebook and Apple patent all kinds of technologies all the time, and sometimes never use the intellectual property they own. Whether they will actually deploy or have actually started using these features isn’t something we know for sure just yet, but Stealing ur feelings imagines the worst that could happen if they did.

To prove its point, the film shows you what it learned about you from your expressions in the past few minutes. According to Stealing ur feelings, I have a:

• 0.890247 positive reaction to Kanye West
• 0.547226 positive reaction to pizza
• 0.012154 bias for black people

Throughout the film, I felt confused about how the system was assessing these supposed biases. It wasn’t until after the film ended when I asked creator Noah Levenson how these numbers were calculated that I learned that the system had been assessing my reaction to the footage it was showing me. Some of its findings were fair, like my preference for celebrity gossip over political analysis in my feeds, and that I like looking at my own face. (To be fair, I was just smiling a lot at the funny masks and filters that the film overlaid on my face as I looked at the screen.)

Many of the film’s assessments were wildly inaccurate, though, like when it said I was 100 percent Republican and that I like pizza. (To the chagrin of my friends, I am not a big fan of pizza.)

But the inaccuracy is the point.

I asked Levenson whether he’s uncovered any evidence to suggest that these companies are using our phone’s cameras to spy on us. “Is it definitely happening? No,” he said. “But maybe.” Levenson pointed to all the patents these companies have filed for different purposes as proof that they’re at least looking into it. “Snap is the most obviously nefarious example,” he said.

Indeed, Snap has a patent titled “Determining a mood for a group” that shows it using smartphone cameras to study a user’s expressions and assign a score to indicate how they feel. These groups are shown in patent drawings as being at concerts or political rallies, with multiple labels showing the rating for various individuals’ mood scores. According to Stealing ur feelings, Snap could then sell that information alongside other data like where the person is or what they might be doing at the time.

This information can then be used to cater content to you. It’s pretty much up to marketers to do whatever they want with the data once they have it. Levenson offered examples like the profiles you’re shown on dating sites or the political messaging you receive. The danger here is, that sometimes — often — the information extrapolated about you is wrong. “When they extract data from you, they market that data as truth,” Levenson said. “They decide how much of a racist you are or what races you seem to prefer.”

Even data that’s not about you could affect your life, Levenson said. “What if Kanye’s tour bookers bought Snapchat’s aggregated responses as a way to decide where to have his concerts,” he said. If you liked the artist but people in your neighborhood overwhelmingly disliked him, then you might lose out on an opportunity to catch a concert at a location convenient for you.

The idea isn’t new: Marketers already use old-school information like demographics, survey data or purchasing habits to make similar decisions. But it’s the idea that something as new and unpredictable as facial expression can be used in such an exploitative manner that Levenson wants us to think about. I have doubts that big tech companies are actively carrying out such invasive data harvesting methods, but Levenson believes that at the very least, something is going on. “What we know is there are a lot of companies using facial emotion recognition for various purposes,” he said.

Some use cases are less nefarious. For example, Snap has another patent titled “Emotion recognition in video conferencing” that’s described as a means to enable “another videoconference participant, such as a service provider or supervisor, to handle angry, annoyed, or distressed customers.”

Regardless of how a company says it’ll use emotion recognition tech, Levenson believes we should be vigilant. He started developing the film after winning a $50,000 Mozilla grant for art and advocacy exploring artificial intelligence last year, and had its official debut at Tribeca last week. You can check out an early version of it on Github. The project will launch as a website later this year, so you can see for yourself what your biases for Kanye and pizza are. Or what Stealing ur feelings thinks they are, anyway.

Among the new shows are Two Sides, which Snap is calling “New Form” genre because it lets viewers watch the narrative from both characters’ point of view at the same time. Basically, what Snap is doing is splitting your screen into two; one character is on the top and the other on the bottom. While Black, on the other hand, is a docuseries that explores racially charged social issues in the US. And there’s also a comedy show for people who love sneakers called, well, Sneaker Heads, which follows three college freshmen “as they navigate the crazy, shady, mercurial world” of the culture in Los Angeles. Both While Black and Sneaker Heads will arrive in the summer.

Snap’s other new shows include Commanders, Can’t Talk Now, Compton Dreams, Denton’s Death Date, Stranded with Sam and Colby, Dead of Night and an untitled BuzzFeed daily show.

According to Snap executives who spoke to Engadget during a media briefing, original shows like Endless Summer have had as many as 28 million unique viewers on Snapchat, which gives the company confidence in the format as a whole. And it may be onto something, considering that another one of its Originals, Bringing Up Bhabie, has also been quite a hit with its young audiences. The next step, Snap execs said, is to make changes to the app that will make it easier to chat with your friends and quickly get back to watching a show — something that doesn’t work particularly smoothly right now.