Sixty minutes. That’s how long it took for a private Snapchat message to travel from Kristen Volpe’s phone to the FBI to the deputies standing in her elementary school hallway. On January 29, 2025, the 22-year-old student teacher at John L. Hensey Elementary in Washington, Illinois, vented to her boyfriend and two roommates — three people total — after a student closed her laptop mid-class and wiped her lesson plan. She referenced shooting the student or the school. She meant it as a frustrated joke. Snapchat’s algorithm didn’t get the humor.
No student reported her. No parent. No coworker. The flag was entirely automated. Snapchat’s policy permits voluntary emergency disclosures to law enforcement — no warrant required — when the platform determines imminent harm exists. The algorithm makes that initial call. Think of it like your Ring doorbell deciding to call 911 on its own, except the doorbell is reading your text messages.
“Private” and “corporate messaging platform” do not go together, at all. Ever.
The only “private” thing about snapchat is that it warns you when your friend takes a screenshot of your profile, chat, or snaps. Which you can easily bypass by using a second phone. Well that and disappearing snaps and messages so you can cheat on your spouse more easily.
I was involved with someone a few years younger than myself (fit well into the >=(age/2+7) rule, don’t worry) and she said she wished I had snapchat so she could send me photos privately. I explained to her that 1) I’m not the kind to spread nudes and I delete them after a relationship is over anyway, 2) if I wanted to, I could just as easily use my spare phone to take photos of her snaps so it’s a false sense of security for her and 3) snapchat isn’t end to end encrypted and they store snaps even if I can’t see them again. I then proceeded to explain the importance of end to end encryption to her. I ended up receiving nudes over Signal and kept my word and deleted them when we stopped seeing eachother. But it took quite a bit of trust in me for her to be OK with this, whereas people are much looser on snapchat because nobody actually thinks about how little privacy it REALLY provides.
So, she was willing to trust Snapchat to secure her privacy, whereas you had to earn her trust for her to believe you would secure her privacy, while being in a relationship with you. This goes to show how the population thinks. Corporations will take care of me, but the people around me will fuck me over. 😒
Yes. It’s because a corporation, particularly a distant foreign one, is anonymous so you don’t think about it as much whereas if some local guy leaked her nudes, it would most likely reach her friends and family. At least that’s what I think is the reason.