Today marks Data Privacy Day, a global effort to raise awareness about the importance of respecting and safeguarding privacy. Privacy has always been central to Snapchat’s primary use case and mission.

We first built our app to help people connect with their real friends and feel comfortable expressing themselves authentically – without feeling pressure to curate a perfect image or measure themselves against others. We wanted to reflect the natural dynamics between friends in real life, where trust and privacy are essential to their relationships.

We designed Snapchat with fundamental privacy features baked into the app’s architecture, to help our community develop that trust with their real-life friends, and support their safety and wellbeing:

• We focus on connecting people who were already friends in real life and require that, by default, two Snapchatters opt-in to being friends in order to communicate.

• We designed communications to delete by default to reflect the way people talk to their friends in real life, where they don’t keep a record of every single conversation for public consumption.

• New features go through an intensive privacy- and safety-by-design product development process, where our in-house privacy experts work closely with our product and engineering teams to vet the privacy impacts.

We’re also constantly exploring what more we can do to help protect the privacy and safety of our community, including how to further educate them about online risks. To help us continue to do that, we recently commissioned global research to better understand how young people think about their online privacy. Among other things, the findings confirmed that almost 70% of participants said privacy makes them feel more comfortable expressing themselves online, and 59% of users say privacy and data security concerns impact their willingness to share on online platforms You can read more of our findings here.

We feel a deep responsibility to help our community develop strong online privacy habits – and want to reach Snapchatters where they are through in-app education and resources. 

We regularly remind our community to enable two-factor authentication and use strong passwords -- two important safeguards against account breaches, and today are launching new content on our Discover platform with tips about creating unique account credentials and how to set up two-factor authentication. 

We are launching new privacy-focused creative tools, including our first-ever privacy-themed Bitmoji, stickers developed  with the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP), a new Lens in partnership with Future Privacy Forum that shares helpful privacy tips.

In the coming months, we will continue to leverage our research findings to inform additional in-app privacy tools for our community.