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Snapchat scans private messages.
Not just public posts or stories. private group chats between you and your closest contacts. automated AI. no human reviewed it first, got flagged and reported.
Snapchat AI → FBI → local police → school → arrest.
in under an hour.
Snapchat’s privacy policy says it may share your information with law enforcement when it believes there is a risk of harm. the definition of “risk of harm” is determined by an algorithm.
you are not told when a message is flagged.
you are not told when a report is filed.
you find out when the police arrive.
I think people just fundamentally do not understand what the word "private"means. If you are sending a message via centralized service (Snapchat, Facebook, Tiktok, e-mail, etc) it is de-facto not private*. Just because the communication is between two people and not publicly viewable to other users doesn’t give it any special “privacy” status compared the rest of the platform. The operator owns the platform, they can read anything that you type in or upload.
For a message to be actually private it must be encrypted before it leaves your device and decrypted on the recipient’s device, that’s it.
*There are some services that provide end to end encryption of messages but they are not the norm. No e-mail is ever private, even services like Proton only keep things encrypted on their own servers, once that e-mail reaches a gmail inbox it is just as readable as any other.
This is why I came around to adopting the newer language of “DMs/direct messages” instead of the former “PMs/private messages.”
Even then, it may not be private. You need to be able to trust the device and the client software on both ends of the connection. Apple says they care about your privacy, which is why they were talking about putting mandatory client-side filtering on your device to try and control what you are sending and receiving even when your data is encrypted. When you talk about using encryption to protect data sent through Snapchat the app from Snapchat the company, you’re putting the unencrypted data into Snapchat’s app, so even if they say it is end to end encrypted, even if it really is end to end encrypted, you can’t be sure they aren’t reading it anyway.
E-mail can be private, even with gmail. When you send mail through Protonmail, it uses standard PGP encryption, at least for inter-server mail. If the recipient has a public key on file, even if the recipient is using gmail, the message will be sent end to end encrypted. You can use PGP with any mail service that isn’t filtering for and blocking PGP.
Just pointing out that the same warning (company app handled data pre/post E2EE and may have snooped) applies to Apple, Proton, and Gmail. Basically you take their word they don’t read it. Once you have evidence to the contrary they forfeit that trust forever. Snapchat’s privacy campaign is over now.
There’s no ambiguity with gmail. If you send your mail through gmail in plain text, Google is reading it. If you’re using a regular mail SMTP/IMAP mail client to send PGP-encrypted messages, Google has no way to read your messages.
You confuse ‘private’ and ‘secret’.
They are functionally the same when you are talking about online communications. If your message is not secret it is not private, the operator of the messaging service can see the contents of the message.
Private, in the sense of “contains sensitive information that I don’t want public” is just a feeling. Saying those things in a Snapchat “private” message is no different than posting them in a “private” message board. The number of people who can read those messages is reduced but still contains significantly more than you and your intended recipient.
To people who work in security, they are absofuckinglutely not the same.