Snapchat has released its first ever transparency report detailing the ways in which Snapchat has complies with both foreign and domestic law enforcement agencies’ requests for private user data. The numbers aren’t actually all that shocking given that the number of active Snapchat users expected to be somewhere in the realm of 200 million, what is shocking though is how Snapchat complies with the governmental requests at a higher frequency than either Facebook, Twitter, or Google.
In their first ever transparency report Snapchat has released all data regarding law enforcement requests for user data during the dates November 1, 2014—February 28, 2015, and they’ve vowed to release this report every six months. Above is at the ‘United States Criminal Legal Requests’ but to see the full report you can check it out HERE in Snapchat’s blogpost.
USA Today’s Mike Snider recaps the transparency release from Snapchat:
Overall, the photo messaging app received 403 government requests for user information — 375 from U.S. law enforcement and 28 from other international governments, according to its report.
The company says that in July it will begin issuing a full report every six months, but “in the interest of transparency, we figured why wait until we had a full six months of data before publishing our first Transparency Report.”
This early report covers requests received from Nov. 1, 2014 to Feb. 28, 2015. Among the U.S. requests, most were search warrants (172) and subpeonas (159). Snapchat complied with requests 92% of the time.
That’s a higher compliance rate with requests from the U.S. government than other tech companies have reported recently: Google (84%), Twitter (80%) and Facebook (79%).
Snapchat compliance with international reports was much lower. The most requests came from the U.K. (10) and France (9), with Snapchat only complying with 33% of U.K. emergency requests and no others from the countries.
Again, only 403 requests out of an estimated 200 MILLION users is virtually nothing. That means you have a roughly 1 in 496,278 chance of being someone the government requested info on. Even still, I find it unsettling that they’re complying with law enforcement requests at a higher rate than Google, Facebook, and Twitter. Something about that is incredibly unsettling, given that Snapchat’s entire service is all about ephemeral data.
For more on Snapchat’s transparency report CLICK HERE.
[USA Today via Snapchat]