Snapchat users should no longer assume that their accounts are private as the company revealed that it does surrender unopened “self-destructing messages” to police authorities if requested.
Snapchat, a company that delivers a photo and deletes it 10 seconds after the recipient has viewed it.
The “10-second viewing rule” of Snapchat appears to be good enough so the images cannot be viewed by unwanted eyes. However, Micah Schaffer, head of Snapchat trust and safety, said on a blog post on Monday, getting hold of the Snapchat user’s handset is not just the way to retrieve photos sent through Snapchat.
Schaffer said that even if the photos are deleted from their servers after the recipient sees it, it is still retrievable from the servers before these photos have been viewed especially when the law gets involved.
"For example, if we receive a search warrant from law enforcement for the contents of Snaps and those Snaps are still on our servers, a federal law called the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) obliges us to produce the Snaps to the requesting law enforcement agency," said Schaffer in the blog.
He added that Snapchat can still keep photos subject to investigation for day, months, or even years, while waiting for a court order of a search warrant. In those instances, images that users have thought to be deleted for a long time, can still be used as an evidence.
Recipients can also save photos to their devices through apps that claim to do it; so most likely, a subpoena for Snapchat to retrieve the photo won’t be needed.
When asked about how worried should users be? Schaffer said, “not very,” because only he and Bobby Murphy, CTO of Snapchat, have access to the tools used for retrieving unopened selfies from Snapchat servers. Another thing is, Snapchat has not received much requests from the police yet.
Schaffer wrote also, "Since May 2013, about a dozen of the search warrants we've received have resulted in us producing unopened Snaps to law enforcement. That's out of 350 million Snaps sent every day."
