A critical part of our work to make Snapchat safer is working with law enforcement and government agencies to fulfill requests for assistance in investigations. We also work to proactively escalate any content that could involve imminent threats to life, such as school shooting threats, bomb threats, missing persons cases, and other types of harm.

While content on Snapchat is ephemeral, we preserve and provide account information to government agencies in response to valid legal requests. 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 agency and not a bad actor — we respond in compliance with applicable law and privacy requirements.

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

*Starting in this reporting period and moving forward, Snap will be combining subpoenas and summons into one category.

* “Account Identifiers” reflects the number of identifiers (e.g., username, email address, phone number, etc.) 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.

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.