via
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.
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.