Welcome to Snap Inc.’s Privacy Policy. This policy explains how we collect and use your data and how you can control your information. Looking for a quick summary on our privacy practices? Check out this page or this video. If you’re looking for specific product privacy information, for example, how we process your Chats and Snaps, take a look at our Privacy by Product page. In addition to these documents, we also show in-app notices that provide you more information about our products and services. If you’re a SPECS user you can learn more on how we collect and use your data here.

Transparency is one of our core values at Snap. We believe there shouldn’t be any surprises about the data we collect and how we use it – that’s why we’re upfront with how we process it. For example, we process your information to provide you a more personalised experience, including to show you content and information that is most relevant to your experience, as well as more relevant advertisements. Understanding your interests and preferences help us provide a better product experience.

Furthermore, we believe a personalised experience should not come at the expense of your privacy. Just like in real life, there are some moments you want to share privately with your close friends, and others that you want to share publicly. That’s why from day one our philosophy has been to delete content by default and to give Snapchatters control by providing the tools that allow them to decide what happens with their content, like who to share it with or when to save it.

This Policy covers our Snapchat app as well as our other products, services and features, such as Bitmoji, SPECS and our advertising and commerce initiatives. When you read “Services” in this Policy, we’re talking about all of them. Also, if you see us refer to our “Terms”, we mean the Terms of Service that you agree to when you sign up for our Services. Finally, if you see the term "Snapchatter" we are often using that as shorthand for any user of our Services.

Let’s get started with the controls you have over your information:

Another way we provide a personalised Service is through the ads we show. We use your interests and preferences from the information we’ve collected to personalise, target and measure ads. We think ads are best when they’re relevant. That’s why we try to select the right ads and show them to you at the right time. For example, if you’ve interacted with ads for video games, we will infer that you like video games, and show you similar ads, but those won’t be the only ads you see. Similar to our content strategy, we try to ensure you receive a variety of ads. We also use your information to avoid showing you ads you probably won’t be interested in. For example, if a ticketing site tells us you’ve previously bought tickets for a movie – we can stop showing you ads for it. You can learn about the different types of advertising and your choices about which ads you receive here.

You can learn more about how we collect, use and share your information for advertising purposes here.

A note about information collected by cookies and other technologies: we may use these technologies to collect information when you interact with Services we offer through one of our partners. For example, we may use information collected on an advertiser’s website to show you more relevant ads. Most web browsers are set to accept cookies by default. If you prefer, you can usually remove or reject browser cookies through the settings on your browser or device. Keep in mind, though, that removing or rejecting cookies could affect the availability and functionality of our Services. To learn more about how we and our partners use cookies on our Services and your choices, please check out our Cookie Policy.

Our teams are constantly coming up with new ideas for features and ways to improve our Services. In order to do this, we also develop and improve the algorithms and machine learning models (an expression of an algorithm that combs through significant amounts of data to find patterns or make predictions) that make our features and Services work, including through our AI features. Our AI features typically use generative AI (artificial intelligence capable of generating text, images or other media, using generative models). Generative AI models learn the patterns and structure of their input training data and then generate new data that has similar characteristics). We use algorithms, machine learning models and generative AI for personalisation, advertising, safety and security, fairness and inclusivity, augmented reality, and to prevent abuse or other Terms or Community Guidelines violations. For example, our algorithms and machine learning models take into account the conversations Snapchatters are having with My AI to improve the responses from My AI.

Your information can help us decide what kind of improvements we should make, but we are always focused on privacy – and we don’t want to use more of your personal information than is necessary to develop our features and models.

In order to understand what to build or how to improve our Services, we need to understand trends and demand for our features. For example, we monitor metadata and trends about Group Chat use to help decide whether we should change parts of the feature, like the maximum size of a Group. Studying data from Snapchatters can help us see trends in the ways that people use the Services. This helps inspire us to improve Snapchat on a larger scale. We perform analytics in order to identify, monitor and analyse trends and usage. Based on this information, we will, among other things, create information about our users to help us understand demand.

In this section, we provide you with information on how long we keep your information, why we keep your information and also highlight how we may need to keep your information to comply with laws, courts and other obligations.

As a general rule, we keep information as long as you tell us to, and otherwise as long as we need it to provide our Services, or as required by law. For example, if you store something in Memories, we will keep it as long as you need it, but when you Chat with a friend, our systems are designed to delete Chats you send within 24 hours after your friend reads it (unless you’ve changed your default settings or decide to save it). Whether we retain your data depends on the specific feature, your settings and how you’re using the Services. Here are some more factors we consider when we decide how long to keep your information:

• If we need the information to operate or provide our Services. For example, we store your basic account details – like your name, phone number and email address – to maintain your account.

• To do the things you expect from our Services and as we’ve described within this Privacy Policy. For example, we maintain your list of friends until you ask us to delete them since friends are key to expressing yourself. Similarly, we keep your shared list of contacts until you ask us to remove them in our app settings (note: updating your device permissions may not remove the contacts you’ve previously shared with Snapchat). Learn more. Conversely, Snaps and Chats sent in Snapchat will be deleted by default from our servers within 24 hours after we detect they’ve been opened by all recipients or have expired, unless you’ve changed your default settings or decide to save something, in which case we will honour your choices.

• The information itself. For example, we store location information (IP-address based or precise, depending on your permissions) for different lengths of time based on how precise it is and which Services you use. If location information is associated with a Snap – like those saved to Memories or posted to Snap Map or Spotlight – we'll retain that location as long as we store the Snap. Expert tip: you can see the location data we retain about you by downloading your data.

• How long we need to retain the information to comply with certain legal obligations.

• If we need it for other legitimate purposes, such as to prevent harm, investigate possible violations of our Terms of Service or other policies, investigate reports of abuse or protect ourselves or others.

• Have a look at our Privacy by Product page and support page for details on the specific retention periods for products.

Although our systems are designed to delete some of your information automatically, we cannot promise that deletion will take place by a specific time.

In some cases we need to comply with legal requirements to store your data which stops us from deleting your information. For example, if we receive a notice from a court asking us to keep a copy of your content. Other reasons we may keep a copy of your data are if we get reports of abuse or other Terms or policy violations, or if your account, content created by you or content created with other Snapchatters is flagged by others or our systems for abuse or other Terms or policy violations. Finally, we may also keep certain information in backup for a limited period of time or as required by law.

For the latest information about how long we store different types of content, check out our Support Site.

Control over your information and settings is a core part of Snapchat experience. You can access, update and delete your information, decide who can contact you and download your data from within the Snapchat app. Below, we give you more details on the types of settings that are available, link out to our data download tool and provide instructions on how to delete data or your account.

We want you to be in control of your information, so we provide you with a range of tools, including:

• Access and update your information. You can access and edit most of your basic information, including account details (information about you, like your name, username, email address, birthday and phone number), right in our Services. Just navigate to your settings and you will see the options available to you.

• Delete your information. If you want to delete your account, learn how here. You can also delete some information within our Services, like content you’ve saved to Memories, content you’ve shared with My AI, Spotlight submissions and more.

• Control who can see your content. We’ve built a number of tools that let you choose who you share your content with. In some cases you may want to share content with just your friends, and in other instances you may want to share it with the public. To learn more, go here.

• Control who can contact you. Snapchat is intended for close friends and family, that’s why we’ve built controls that help you decide who can contact you. If you receive unwanted communications, you can always block and report that person. Please go here to learn more.

• Change your permissions. In most cases, you can change your permissions at any time. For example, by default you are findable to others through your phone number and/or email address that you provided. If you no longer want to be findable, you can always change your settings. Or if you provided access to your phone or third party platform contacts to make friending easier, you can change that later on in your app settings. Of course, if you do that, certain features and Services, like finding friends in your contact book, won’t work.

• Opt out of promotional messages. You have the option to opt out or unsubscribe from promotional emails and messages sent by SMS or other messaging platforms. To do so, just follow the instructions in the message like an unsubscribe link or similar functionality.

• Download your data. You can make a request in our Download My Data tool to export a copy of your Snapchat information.

• Object to processing. Depending on where you live and the particular data we are processing, you may have the right to object to our processing of that information. This gets a bit technical, so we’ve explained it in more detail here.

• Set advertising preferences. We try to show you ads that we think will be relevant to your interests, but if you’d like to have a less personalised experience, you can change your advertising settings in the Snapchat app. Learn more here.

• Tracking. If you use an iPhone with iOS 14.5 or above, some specific requirements apply, which we’ve specified here.

This section provides you with details on what information we collect: what you provide to us, what we collect when you use Snapchat and information we receive from other companies or apps you’ve connected to your Snapchat account. Sometimes, we may also collect additional information, with your permission.

When you use our Services, such as Snapchat, we collect information you provide to us, generate information when you use our Services and in some cases receive data from others. Let’s break these down in more detail.

Many of our Services require you to set up an account. To do this, we ask you to provide us with account details. When you set up your profile, you’ll also provide us with profile details (like your Bitmoji and profile picture). If you use our commerce products to buy something, like those latest trainers, we may ask you for payment and related information (like your physical address, so we can ship the product to you, payment information, so we can process the payment, and transaction history). Based on your region, we may also use information you provide to estimate or infer your age or ask you to verify your age. 

Of course, you’ll also provide us with information you send through or save within our Services, including content and information about that content, and content you share and generate with our AI Features (content, or “Inputs”, including text, images, video, audio, precise location and engagement, including content you share with My AI, used to generate content and responses, or “Outputs”). We consider some of this information to be private content and communications (like Snaps and Chats with your friends, voice and video calls, and content that is saved in My Eyes Only). Or content you share with a particular audience like private & friend stories (My Story set to Friends, Private Stories). On the other end of the spectrum, some of the information you send through or save within our Services may be public content that is accessible to everyone (such as Public Story content, including My Story set to Everyone, Shared Stories and Community Stories, Spotlight or Snap Map submissions and Public Profile information). Keep in mind that Snapchatters who view your Snaps, Chats and any other content, can always screenshot that content, save it or copy it outside the Snapchat app. So please don’t send messages or share content that you wouldn’t want someone to save or share.

Lastly, when you contact Support (content and communications shared with Support) or our Safety team, or communicate with us in any other way, including through our research efforts (like responses to surveys, consumer panels or other research questions), we’ll collect whatever information you provide or that we need to resolve your question.

Our Services may contain content and integrations offered by our integrated partners. Examples include integrations in Lenses, Camera editing tools and the Map, and third-party developer integrations with our Services. Your information may be provided to the integrated partner through these integrations, as well as to Snap. We are not responsible for how those partners collect or use your information. As always, we encourage you to review the privacy policies of every third-party service that you visit or use, including those third parties you interact with through our Services. You can learn more about our integrations in Snapchat here.

On iOS, we use Apple’s TrueDepth camera to improve the quality of Lenses. Note, however, that this information is used in real time – we don’t store this information on our servers or share it with third parties.

Our Services connect you with your friends around the world. To make that possible, we may collect your personal information from, transfer it to and store and process it in the United States or other countries outside where you live. Whenever we share information outside where you live, we ensure safeguards are in place to protect the data as required by law where you live. If you want to learn more about this, see the Region Specific Information section for more details.

We conduct research to better understand general consumer interests, trends and how our Services are used by you and others in our community. This information, along with analytics (as we described above), helps us understand more about our community and about how our Services fit into the lives of those in our community. We also engage in research and development to develop new techniques and technologies (e.g. new machine learning models or hardware, such as SPECS). The results of our research are sometimes used in features on Snapchat, and we sometimes publish papers about things like overall behaviours and consumer trends (which will only have aggregated data across our user base, and not contain any of your private content and communications or personal information about you specifically).

We use your information to enhance the safety and security of our Services, verify Snapchatter identity or age, and prevent fraud or other unauthorised or illegal activity. For example, we provide two-factor authentication to help protect your account and can send you email or text messages if we notice any suspicious activity. We also scan URLs sent on Snapchat to see if that webpage is potentially harmful and can give you a warning about it.

We may use automated tools to detect potential violations of our Terms or Community Guidelines including harmful or unlawful activity and confirm age-appropriate use. These tools may use signals such as account, device, usage and content-related information described in this Policy.

Sometimes we’ll get in touch with you to promote new or existing features. This includes sending Snapchatters communications through Snapchat, email, SMS or other messaging platforms, where permitted. For example, we may use the Snapchat app, email, SMS or other messaging platforms to share information about our Services and promotional offers that we think may interest you.

Other times, we need to communicate with you to provide information, alerts or to send messages our users ask us to deliver at their request. This may include sending communications through Snapchat, email, SMS or other messaging platforms, where permitted, to deliver account status updates, security alerts and Chat or friending reminders; it may also include fulfilling our user’s request to send invites or Snapchat content to non-Snapchatters.

When you ask for help, we want to get you support as quickly as possible. In order to provide you, the Snapchatter community and our business partners with the help needed to resolve issues with our Services, we often need to use the information we have collected to respond.

We use the data we collect to enforce our Terms, policies and the law. This includes enforcing, investigating and reporting conduct that violates our Terms, policies or the law, responding to requests from law enforcement, and complying with legal requirements. For example, when unlawful content is posted on our Services, we may need to enforce our Terms and other policies. In some cases, we may also use or share your information to cooperate with law enforcement requests, escalate safety issues to law enforcement, industry partners or others, or comply with our legal obligations, including to verify the ages of our users. Check out our Transparency Report to learn more.

Additionally, there may be instances when you interact with our Services that we will ask for your permission to use your information in a new, different or otherwise specific way.