SnapChat must* be surveilling their non-encrypted chats (i.e. all of them, but they travel over HTTPS for privacy) & triggering on sensitive words, either on-server or on-client, reporting to law enforcement who then over-react … PLUS they announced support for the illiberal & misconceived KidsOnlineSafetyAct.
The two, combined, are not a great indicator for how they view user privacy.
A Spanish court has cleared a British man of public disorder, after he joked to friends about blowing up a flight from London Gatwick to Menorca […] A key question in the case was how the message got out, considering Snapchat is an encrypted app. One theory, raised in the trial, was that it could have been intercepted via Gatwick’s Wi-Fi network. But a spokesperson for the airport told BBC News that its network “does not have that capability”. In the judge’s resolution, cited by the Europa Press news agency, it was said that the message, “for unknown reasons, was captured by the security mechanisms of England when the plane was flying over French airspace”. The message was made “in a strictly private environment between the accused and his friends with whom he flew, through a private group to which only they have access, so the accused could not even remotely assume… that the joke he played on his friends could be intercepted or detected by the British services, nor by third parties other than his friends who received the message,” the judgement added. It was not immediately clear how UK authorities were alerted to the message, with the judge noting “they were not the subject of evidence in this trial”.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-68099669
[*] if the cause is not Snap themselves then their transport security is broken and that’s an even bigger story, being either being a weakness in the app or an undocumented man-in-the-middle HTTPS backdoor implemented by authorities in airport wireless transportation
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