Law enforcement has had a tough time with snapchat because they actually do delete the data according to their policy. They have a law enforcement guide which g

Law enforcement has had a tough time with snapchat because they actually do delete the data according to their policy. They have a law enforcement guide which goes over what to expect for data requests, and it's quite sparse. Can't link right now, on mobile and it's a PDF. In 2014, they were seeing 400 million images per day, 88% of which were to one person [1]. Assuming 0.33 mb/image, no videos, and 100% going to 1 person, that's 132 TB/day. Per their recent SEC filing, they're now up to 2.5 billion snaps per day. [2] There's a strong business case for deleting the files as soon as you can. Before they were a gigantic company, their brand trust and keeping things lean encouraged deleting the photos. I believe that holds true today. [1] http://www.businessinsider.com/how-many-snaps-snapchat-users-get-2013-11 http://www.businessinsider.com/how-many-snaps-snapchat-users... [2] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1564408/000119312517029199/d270216ds1.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1564408/000119312517... Edit: I decided to run some quick 'n dirty estimation and was a bit surprised by how "cheap" it would actually be to store it all. Snap uses Google Cloud Services, and given their volume, will have a pretty sweet pricing deal. For that reason, I estimated with $0.007/GB, which is the coldline rate per [3] even though they probably wouldn't be doing coldline storage. http://imgur.com/a/Boqlm http://imgur.com/a/Boqlm Very rough estimate for 1 year of storing every image snap from now until next year is ~13.5 million. At 2.5 billion snaps/day, images only, it would cost ~$5775/month to store all the data generated today. As an aside, I do wonder if there would be an opportunity for Snap to get and store context from an image without storing the image. It may be a balance between big data and minimizing costs. I'm thinking something along the lines of the list of words from Clarifai [4] stored with the metadata. It wouldn't be very useful to the police because the image recognition is wrong sometimes. "Marijuana" as a tag would be very weak evidence to put forth in court if the police didn't also have the image. [3] https://cloud.google.com/storage/pricing#storage-pricing https://cloud.google.com/storage/pricing#storage-pricing [4] https://developer.clarifai.com/models/aaa03c23b3724a16a56b629203edc62c https://developer.clarifai.com/models/aaa03c23b3724a16a56b62...