SOCIETY
Technology is most powerful when it enables genuine human connection, and that's only possible when users feel protected. Our commitments to privacy, safety, and security shape every decision across our product lifecycle, from how we design features to how we enforce our policies, and from our direct relationships with users to our collaboration with law enforcement, researchers, and civil society. We hold ourselves to this standard, and we expect the same firm commitment from our suppliers, advertisers, and brand partners.
KEY METRICS AND HIGHLIGHTS
1-minute
median response time for potential safety violations (87% reduction)
0.01%
Violative View Rate equivalent to one violation per 10,000 views of Snaps and Stories
6,000+
law enforcement professionals engaged globally through summits
9,000+
respondents surveyed for Digital Well-Being Index across six countries
“At Snap, we work thoughtfully to balance privacy and safety — from private-by-default design choices to proactive detection, easy reporting tools, and quick review when concerns are raised. Our goal is to protect personal connection while responding quickly to potentially harmful content, all in service of our community.”
Rachel Hochhauser
Director, Safety Operations Outreach, Snap
We consider the well-being of our community — specifically teens — and age suitability at all stages of product and policy design, implementation, and management.
We work with safety advocates, experts, and other leaders in their fields to discuss, review, vet, and test products and policies until they are ready to be deployed and implemented.
We communicate directly and openly with our community so that Snapchatters understand our policies as well as the consequences of violating them.
We empower Snapchatters by providing readily discoverable, consistent, and easy-to-use features and controls, as well as actionable advice and guidance about staying safe.
We aim to detect, remove, enforce against, and report content and individuals that violate our policies.
We aim to be transparent and timely in our engagements with policymakers, law enforcement agencies, partners, collaborators, parents, and the global public, while acknowledging that we don’t have all the answers but are committed to continuous learning and improvement.
We Communicate Honestly and Openly: When you use Snap’s services, you share information with us. So it’s our responsibility to help you understand how that information is used. Our Privacy Policy explains how we collect, use, share, and keep information, highlights of which can be found here. If you’re curious about how a certain feature uses your data, Privacy by Product breaks things down a bit more. We also explain how features use data right inside of our apps and throughout our Support Site. Of course, if you still can’t find what you need, you can always ask!
You Choose How to Express Yourself: We believe that privacy is essential to empowering self-expression. That’s why you’re in control of who you share things with, how you share them, and how long they can be seen by Snapchatters and, if you so choose, the public. You decide who can see your Story, which friends can see your Bitmoji on the Snap Map, and just how long your Snaps with friends stick around. You can keep things just between you and a friend, or share a moment with the whole world! Learn more.
We Design with Privacy in Mind: New features go through an intense privacy review process. We talk about things, we debate them, and we work hard to build products and services we’re proud of and that we’ll want to use. After all, we use these products and services every day, both at work and in our personal lives. We handle your information with the same care that we expect for ourselves, our company, our family, and our friends.
You Control Your Information: You have the right to control your information. That’s why we provide easy ways to access and update your information, adjust how much information you share with us and others, and request that we delete your information or your account, altogether. You can control most of your privacy settings right in our apps. You can even log in and download your Snapchat information here. If you ever have any specific questions about your data, don’t hesitate to contact us!
Deletion is Our Default: Snapchat aims to capture the feeling of hanging out with friends in person. That’s why our systems are designed to delete Snaps and Chats with friends from our servers once they’ve been viewed or have expired (depending on your settings). After a Snap or Chat with a friend is deleted, we’ll mainly be able to see the basic details (we call this “metadata”), like when it was sent and who it was sent to. Of course, you can always choose to save Snaps to your Memories. Learn more.
We treat your conversations and the content you share with My AI a bit differently, retaining it until you ask us to delete it or delete your account.
It’s important to keep in mind that other Snapchatters can always take a screenshot or save things using a third-party app. At the end of the day, it’s best to only share the need-to-know stuff with the people you really trust, just like you would in real life!
"Safety isn't addressed in isolation. It requires continuous coordination across product, enforcement, research, and partnerships. Through our Councils, insights from teens, and engagement with law enforcement, we listen directly to the people we serve and build systems that respect their agency while helping to keep them protected."
Jacqueline Beauchere
Global Head of Platform Safety, Snap
It’s critical that the Snapchat community can share authentically and connect meaningfully with the people who matter to them in an environment where they feel protected. That means that privacy, safety, and security are foundational to how we build our products. From the moment a concept is conceived, through design, engineering, testing, and launch, these interconnected priorities guide the decision-making process, with input from multiple teams. This commitment extends to new products and emerging technologies, where we apply the same intentional rigor to anticipate risks and embed protections from the start.
At Snap, teams across product, engineering, privacy, trust and safety, legal and policy, and design work together to identify, prevent, and detect violations before they spread, and to respond swiftly when users report harm. In 2025, we further reduced median response times from detection of a violation (whether proactive or upon receipt of a report) to final action on the relevant content or account, lowering them to about 1 minute, an average decrease of approximately 87% compared with 2024. This improvement was largely driven by efforts to prioritize reports based on severity of harm and expand the use of high-precision automated review. We improved the overall automation rate for reports handled by the Trust and Safety team to 58% from 44%, allowing our teams to focus on the most nuanced cases where context and human judgment matter most.
The effectiveness of this work is reflected in our data. We maintain a Violative View Rate of 0.01%, meaning that out of every 10,000 Snap and Story views on Snapchat, we found that only one contained content violating our Community Guidelines.
We've embedded privacy safeguards directly into product development, making it inseparable from how we build, launch, and evolve features. Privacy governance at Snap is inherently cross-functional. Guided by our Privacy Policy and Privacy Principles, designers, engineers, data scientists, product managers, attorneys, privacy engineers, and compliance specialists work together to ensure we collect only what we need, use data as narrowly as possible, and stay ahead of evolving regulatory expectations.
In 2025, our privacy team conducted more than 1,000 reviews across new and updated features, assessing how our products and features handle personal data, supporting user control, and working to minimize data collection and tailor its use as narrowly as possible in line with applicable compliance requirements. We also made concrete improvements to how Snapchatters interact with their own privacy:
We enhanced the Download My Data tool with real-time push and in-app confirmations when requests are submitted, improved status visibility that persists longer in the app, developed a dedicated Memories-only export option with custom date ranges, and expanded language support for global accessibility.
We improved navigation to Download My Data within Settings, making it easier for users to discover and use.
We provided clear guidance on how content is selected and ranked by expanding existing transparency pages for Ads, Spotlight, and Discover.
Snap’s approach to safety rests on a multi-pronged framework: We design with safety in mind from concept onward, leveraging advanced machine learning and detection systems to proactively identify potential harm; we equip the Snapchat community with meaningful controls — including in-app reporting, privacy settings, and Family Center for teens and their parents or caregivers — so they can shape their own experience; we mobilize our safety teams to respond to emerging risks with speed and precision; and we engage experts, civil society organizations, and law enforcement to help strengthen our defenses and educate our community.
In 2025, we strengthened our safety infrastructure in multiple ways. We took additional steps to detect and remove usernames and display names that violate our Community Guidelines, tightening controls over how accounts present themselves on the platform. We also built upon our existing device blocking capabilities to further our protections intended to keep individuals whose accounts we disabled from circumventing safety rules and reoffending. Recognizing that families are central to teen safety, we made Family Center easier to navigate and expanded its capabilities with new features that give parents deeper insights into how their teens use Snapchat.
To complement our default protections, we improved detection capabilities to identify and remove harmful content:
We expanded our ability to detect and remove duplicates of Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse Imagery (CSEAI) and Non-Consensual Intimate Imagery (NCII), and to detect previously identified CSEAI even after it has been modified.
We expanded our use of signal-based detection and abusive-language detection, including for harms such as grooming, sexual extortion (sextortion), and drugs and other prohibited substances.
We implemented new machine learning technology to enhance detection of sensitive content and filter both inappropriate creators and content for teens, providing additional safeguards.
Security is embedded in how we build. Snap invests in hardened infrastructure, platforms, and developer tools, including static and dynamic code analysis, third-party vulnerability scanning, and automated security controls, to ensure our products and services are resilient against emerging threats. These technical safeguards are complemented by a security-first culture across our engineering teams.
We equip our workforce with the training and resources needed to adopt a security mindset from day one. Our security team provides assurance reviews and guidance to developers, engineers, vendors, and others, helping ensure that every product meets our rigorous standards for security, privacy, and safety. Our detection and response capabilities provide continuous visibility into both external and internal threats. We combine this real-time monitoring with proactive security testing and threat intelligence to anticipate vulnerabilities before they can be exploited.
Snap Philanthropy's mission is to empower high school and community college students from under-resourced communities by supporting access to education and exposure to career pathways in STEAM-related fields, while strengthening the cities where we live and work. Hands-on engagement is at the core of Snap Philanthropy's approach to impact across our global communities. We remain hyper-focused on coupling mission-aligned donations with volunteer opportunities that are local to our office footprint. Through our work, we take a bespoke approach to philanthropic program design and community engagement — prioritizing relationships, authenticity, and intentionality in service of initiatives that leave a lasting impact.
In 2025, Snap Philanthropy hosted more than 1,000 volunteer events globally, reaching over 18,000 students and community members across our three impact areas:
Access to Education – In a rapidly shifting tech landscape, access to relevant, future-ready curriculum has never been more critical. Through this impact area, Snap Philanthropy is invested in programs that equip students with technical and durable skills that build confidence, adaptability, and professional literacy as they navigate toward the careers of tomorrow.
Mentorship & Career Pathways – For many students, access to mentorship and real-world insights serves as the bridge between education and opportunity. Through this impact area, Snap Philanthropy facilitates authentic spaces for students to connect directly with Snap team members who offer guidance, perspective, and encouragement grounded in valuable lived experiences.
Community Well-Being –At the heart of Snap Philanthropy’s programming is a deep commitment to the cities where we live and work. Through this impact area, we remain dedicated to strengthening relationships with our neighbors and community-based organizations across a diverse spectrum of causes.
READ OUR POLICIES
The safety of the Snapchat community is a top priority. We take behavior that jeopardizes the safety of our community very seriously, particularly when the risk of harm is severe. You can read more about content and behavior prohibited on Snapchat in our Community Guidelines and Terms of Service.
Our advertisers and media partners must adhere to our Advertising Policy and Snap Commercial Content Policy in order to ensure their content is accurate and fact-checked where needed. In addition, our editorial team works closely with Snap publishing partners to adhere to our Content Guidelines for Recommendation Eligibility.
LOOKING AHEAD
As online risks evolve, so must our defenses. In the year ahead, we will make further investments in our collaboration with law enforcement, in our Safety Advisory Board, and in our teen Councils for Digital Well-Being to help address emerging and potential harms. We will continue advancing our Family Center and safety education resources, informed by teen and parent feedback. And we will continue to develop our transparency reporting to provide enhanced visibility into enforcement trends and the nature of risks on our platform.
DOWNLOAD THE CITIZEN SNAP REPORT