A critical part of our work to make Snapchat safer is cooperating with law enforcement and government agencies to fulfill valid requests for information to assist in investigations. We also work to proactively escalate any content that could involve imminent threats to life or bodily harm.

While most content on Snapchat deletes by default, we work to preserve and provide account information to government agencies in accordance with applicable law. Once we have received and established the validity of a legal request for Snapchat account records — which is important in verifying the request is being made by a legitimate law enforcement or government agency and not a bad actor — we respond in compliance with applicable law and privacy requirements.

The charts below detail the types of requests we support from law enforcement and government agencies, including subpoenas and summons, court orders, search warrants, and emergency disclosure requests.

Also, the percentage of requests for which some data was produced is calculated as of the publication date, based on requests received within the reporting period. In infrequent situations where a request was determined to contain a deficiency — leading Snap not to produce data — and law enforcement later submitted an amended, valid request after publication of the transparency report, the later production of data would not be reflected in the original or subsequent reporting periods.

* “Account Identifiers” reflects the number of identifiers (e.g., username, email address, and phone number) belonging to a single account specified by law enforcement in legal process when requesting user information. Some legal process may include more than one identifier. In some instances, multiple identifiers may identify a single account. In instances where a single identifier is specified in multiple requests, each instance is included.

** To the extent Snap has received requests under the Investigatory Powers Act from the UK pursuant to the US-UK Data Access Agreement (which entered into force on October 3, 2022), reporting on any such requests will be delayed in accordance with the applicable requirements of that law. For more information, please see: https://www.ipco.org.uk/publications/annual-reports/.

Note: Although we do not formally track when we remove content that violates our policies when a request has been made by a governmental entity, we believe it is an extremely rare occurrence. When we believe it is necessary to restrict content that is deemed unlawful in a particular country, but does not otherwise violate our policies, we seek to restrict access to it geographically when possible, rather than remove it globally.

As an additional note, our teams have begun to further improve our governmental takedown operations, to track the information required to be disclosed under the Digital Services Act. In future reports, we will roll out new data points in this category.