Snapchat is only one of several organizations who get a copy of the messages.

Sure, but the point is that they aren't retained, and in turn, leave young people in a position where they won't be blackmailed as adults for the shitty things they said as a teenager on platforms they thought were safe.

They are retained by the other organizations. It's good that at least snapchat itself removes it's copies though.

Who are the other organizations? You sound super sure, I feel like I missed a news story recently that you read.

I'm not sure if there has been confirmation anywhere but it would be foolish to assume nobody is storing the messages you send on a closed platform. You don't know how it works so your only safe assumption is the worst case.

We all thought Usenet was ephemeral and then Dejanews revealed themselves...

Didn't know that, who gets copies?

Not sure wha GP is referring to exactly. But at least in theory, it’s possible for Google to access the images, since they’re stored on Google servers. In practice this is very unlikely.

If you save the snaps to your camera roll, then any app with photos permissions has access to them (along with any metadata). But that’s obvious.

I am astounded of the faith people still have that companies and 3 letter agencies will not store and use their data forever, after all the revelations in the past years. And to think this is YCombinator News, not some random news website.

It's not faith, for me, I was just surprised by the confidence with which Xeoncross said that the data is copied. It sounded like this was just a public, documented fact that I missed.

Safe assumptions:

1) The network is compromised.

2) Users have hostile intent.

3) (Cloud) storage is publicly visible.