If you thought your Snapchats disappear forever after you’ve opened them, think again. The app makers have clarified yet again today that your Snaps are not just manually retrievable, but a dozen unopened snaps have already been given up by Snapchat to law-enforcers since May 2013. According to a blog post by Micah Schaffer, who handles Trust and Safety at Snapchat, the snaps that you send out are retrievable only if they’re unopened. Once snaps are opened up by the receiver, they disappear completely off the app’s servers that are hosted by Google. Snaps that are unopened, on the other hand, can be manually fetched by the company. They must, however, at the behest of law-enforcement agencies.
Snapchat has to give away unopened snaps under warrant
As an example, says Schaffer, if the company receives a search warrant from law enforcement for certain snaps that still happen to be on its server, a federal law called Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) obliges the company to produce the snaps to the requesting law enforcement agency. The post also mentions that Snapchat has obliged with a dozen such search warrants since May this year. To put it into perspective, Schaffer says, it’s just 12 odd snaps out of 350 million sent every day. Schaffer also says that only two people in the entire company are able to access these messages – CTO/ Co-Founder Bobby Murphy and Schaffer himself. While Snapchat is not the only company who has had to comply with law enforcement requests, it will serve the app’s users well to know that their super-secretive favourite application is not all that secure.Meanwhile, yet another application that lets you save Snapchats has cropped up. For $0.99, SnapHack allows you to circumvent the app’s key feature of destroying messages within seconds and lets you save these snaps forever, reports the Los Angeles Times. SnapHack joins the likes of Snap Save that happen to be paid apps for saving snaps. The next time you’re sharing a private moment on Snapchat with a friend, you’d do well to keep in mind that the application isn’t exactly foolproof.
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