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.
Bullshit. This wasn’t a public space.
Imagine I rent you a hotel room. You expect it to be private. Except hidden in the fine print of the check-in paperwork it states that there are microphones in the hotel room and anything you say there can be reported to the authorities.
That is the comparable situation. Quit equating this to public speech.
These companies encourage us to treat these tools as private. They literally fucking them PRIVATE CHATS. Because that will encourage us to use their platforms more.
If this is going to be the standard, we should make it illegal for companies like this to offer private chats as a feature. If the speech is going to be policed this much, we should make it so everything has to be published, in public, for anyone to see, under your real name.
The problem is the tool is sold as as private, but then policed like you’re standing outside a school with a bullhorn threatening to shoot the place up.
And they would be fools.
Microphones in the hotel? No need, you carry them in your pocket almost 24/24. There are some in your car. Even if you don’t have a smartphone, a nice combo of PervGlasses and surrounding phones will be sufficient to get what you’re venting about, so that law enforcement can protect the society from your darkest jokes…
And by the time this is implemented, piece by piece, the very same people claiming it’s acceptable/a good thing will totally agree with the processing: you should mind what you say around people, or alone.
You have an expectation of privacy in a hotel room. Privacy over social media is akin to passing a note in a classroom and getting upset the teacher snatches it and reads it. Your “private” messages on Discord are not private.
Read more carefully. I’m obviously not talking about how these online spaces are legally defined. I’m talking about how the companies instruct their users to use them. I don’t blame people for acting in a way that they’re told they can act.
“The private chat has no expectation of privacy!”
Orwellian bullshit.
Your issue is one of branding, which is fair. Though, it is not a social media company’s responsibility to educate users on the distinction between “private” from other users and “encrypted” from government snooping.
That’s the fundamental problem I have with this. I don’t believe in trapping people through gotcha bear traps. If you’re going to be scanning every message for violations of rules, you shouldn’t be advertising that service as private. In fact, they shouldn’t even have DMs in that case.
And e-mail, and FB Messenger and the rest, but people don’t get that. People responding to posts in public forums think they are just talking with one other person because “I don’t see anybody else here” - meanwhile, the post will stay up open and searchable for decades.