Snapchat, by its very nature is a temporary picture-sharing service.
What makes it attractive at all is the ability of the sender to limit the amount of time the receiver can see the photo, anywhere from one to ten seconds. After that amount of time, the photo is supposedly gone forever.
A big story on AL.com at the moment is about the Blount County teacher, Ashley Parkins Pruitt arrested yesterday afternoon, accused of having inappropriate sexual relationships with three high school-aged boys.
Authorities say that the teacher sent some rather revealing photographs to the boys via Snapchat, among other offenses.
Are those photos still around? If they are, does law enforcement have access to them?
And if they do, are Snapchat messages really as fleeting as they are made out to be?
Like most consumer-serving technology companies, Snapchat has a Law Enforcement Guide that serves as a kind of FAQ for those in the government that may want to obtain records of users.
The guide says that Snapchat will release records about an individual account as long as the enforcement agency follows the processes laid out by the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) of 1986.
The text of the act simply extends citizen protections against wiretaps to the arena of digital communications. Pretty progressive for 1986, I think.
The process is a simple subpoena for documentation. It doesn't get them much.
All a subpoena will get a law enforcement agency is access to your basic account info: your account name, email address, phone number, and when the account was created.
If the agency needs more, like a log of previous snapchats, they have to obtain either a state or federal search warrant.
The log is only meta-data - data about the data of the messages - not the actual content of the messages.
For instance, if you sent me a picture of your dog last week and your Snapchat records were acquired through a search warrant, it would show that you sent me a message and at what time, but would not show that it was a picture of your dog.
The actual content of the Snapchats are much less likely to be available to law enforcement. This is because, true to their words, the content of the Snapchats, the actual pictures, are deleted from the Snapchat servers as soon as both parties have seen the content.
The exception to this rule is if the receiving party has not opened that particular chat and seen the content. In that case, the chat is wiped from their servers 30 days after sending.
At the far end of the privacy spectrum, Snapchat does have a system for requesting individual's records in the event of an emergency.
These emergency requests are handled very carefully and are only granted when and if someone is in immediate danger.
So there you have it, Snapchat will not turn over the content of your past Snapchats because it no longer has access to them.
Snapchat couldn't cooperate with law enforcement even if they wanted to, because, as part of their base operations, the content of messages is not available to them.
We've talked about this kind of model before. It's what's called a commitment device. Both Apple and Android have recently instituted similar plans for the way they handle customer data.
But what about The Snappening?
200,000 compromising pictures were leaked a couple of months ago which originally came from Snapchat.
Even though those pictures were originally sent through the Snapchat servers, they were actually leaked by a third party application whose sole purpose was the retaining of Snapchats for users.
These third party apps are sketchy, at best, and may offer no privacy protections at all, from law enforcement or otherwise.
Furthermore, keep in mind that the receiver of any message you send has the ability to screenshot the Snapchat while it is still being viewed. In this case, the picture resides on the phone of whomever you sent it to and is available to law enforcement for search, just like anything else the person in question may be carrying.
Snapchat will not willfully hand over content to law enforcement, but they can only guarantee and protect what is actually in their servers. Everything else is pretty much fair game.
Your best bet is to not send illicit things across the internet.
