Snapchat, a social media service, recently updated its privacy policy and terms of service. Shortly thereafter, Snapchat, with its fairly uninspiring legacy on privacy issues, had to convince users that it was not attempting to hoard all those sexts and selfies.
Both the terms of service and privacy policy were updated on October 28 by Snapchat, but on Sunday they released a blog post which detailed the changes after reports by media that Snapchat had given itself a white canvas to utilize everything uploaded onto its servers.
The terms of service states that “you grant Snapchat a worldwide, perpetual, royalty-free, sublicensable, and transferable license to host, store, use, display, reproduce, modify, adapt, edit, publish, create derivative works from, publicly perform, broadcast, distribute, syndicate, promote, exhibit and publicly display that content in any form and in any and all media or distribution methods (now known or later developed).”
Basically, they can do whatever they want with everything. However, this is nothing new. There is a similar paragraph in the previous version of the terms of service on WayBackMachine stored in July.
Snapchat specifically wants to clarify in its blogpost that messages are not stored permanently after they have expired or been viewed. The post reads, “Snapchat is not – and never has been – stockpiling your private Snaps or chats, and because we continue to delete them from our servers as soon as they’re read, we could not – and do not – share them with advertisers or business partners.”
However, it is important to note that the privacy policy also states that the company is unable to “guarantee” that metadata and messages will be removed within a certain time limit.
The blogpost claims that the privacy policy and terms of service were rewritten in order to clarify rules around in-app purchases, make them easier to read, and to explain what identifying information will be available to users.