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.
This is so disturbingly common. Remember the dad that sent a picture to his son’s pediatrician?
And in any other country that may have been correctly classed as a joke, but in the US it ain’t a joke. What a dystopia
Time to tell everyone to uninstall their apps… Oh, wait. We already did that.
The duality of AI…one stops nonexistent threats another one happily puts you into danger
Questions for the ridiculous number of people on here who are perfectly willing to give up their right to privacy because you believe it makes schools and other places safer:
Have you read the 50+ page user agreement for your cell phone company? How about the user agreements of every app that has access to your cell phone, your PC mic or apps that have access to your files? Late model cars have microphones too, as do TV remotes. Microsoft has access to everything on your Windows PC. I’d give 100 to 1 odds that 99% of you haven’t read any of those user agreements OR the UA for private chat apps you are using. Likewise are you sure any cloud storage you’re using isn’t scanning your documents for forbidden phrases?
Since you haven’t read every word of each and every user agreement and think it keeps schools safe, you should be just fine with the fact that EVERYTHING you say or write may be available to law enforcement, even if you’re talking to yourself while sitting on the toilet in your home. If you mutter that you’d like to kill someone or burn something misheard as a school building to the ground you are just fine with AI flagging it and the police knocking on your door in an hour, right? You’ll also be just fine with losing your career and your job never being able to find another one, right? Right? After all, other people never know WTF someone dangerous and violent is going to do.
The number of people on here who are perfectly willing to give up all their rights and have their private communications monitored for something that is nothing more than security theater is unbelievable.
Very well said! Privacy protects the innocent far more than it protects the guilty, and no false positive rate other than zero is acceptable when ‘van bursts in to take your career away over an AI detecting wrongdoing’ in my view.
If a false positive rate of zero is not possible then not building it is the only ethical option.
My gawd. People are missing the issue here. You described it pretty well OP.
Yes there are weirdos and they must be caught. Algorithms are getting out of hand though, targeting their wrong people and not the weirdos. There is a massive privacy issue here. Must every text that we send be accessible by the government? I don’t buy the argument of “I have nothing to hide”. When you are in the hot seat they will use any info they can get their hands on. make an offside joke they will use it.
Fuck this shit.
Even people who have “nothing to hide” aren’t safe.
I’ve lost track of the number of articles about people who were wrongly accused by “AI” camera systems or flagged for arrest because their (relatively common-seeming) name matches or is close to an entirely different person who is a legitimate suspect. Some of those people have been jailed for weeks and have lost their jobs over what amounts to a clerical error.
Is it legal for a service to be called private when it is programmatically shared with law enforcement?
Now that you know everything on Snapchat is going through active automated filtering, consider what Snapchat has chosen NOT to flag and is allowing to flow freely, like sex trafficking and the sale of minors.
As unfair and life-changing as this event has been for this young teacher, I think the actual story of what Snapchat (and every other digital communication method) is reading/tracking yet allowing is a much, much bigger story. And dirtier. With billionaires and pedophiles and all manner of nasty allowables we do not yet know.
That’s a great point. If they aren’t scanning for things, they likely wouldn’t be held responsible, but if they are scanning things, now they are the arbiters of what gets passed on or not.
ChatGPT had an issue where someone got flagged for being a risk, they assessed it in person and decided not to action it, and then something happened. They’re being sued and the Canadian government is getting involved.
What has snapchat now actively decided not to action, where something bad happens, now that we know they read everything?
Welcome to post Constitution USA.
This warrantless mass surveillance technology chain can also easily be used to silence dissent, chill speech, and oppress by race, religion, gender, sexuality, pregnancy status, and any other status so deemed problematic by those with state power. This is not a power delegated to the government by the constitution, and it was not built to protect the people.
We accept impositions on our liberty for the protection of the general welfare. Did this actually protect us?
It was a power pretty heavily implied not to belong to the government. And given thet the 9th says that rights exist beyond those explicitly stated, it should be pretty clear.
Anyways we must make the implied right to privacy explicit
we must make the implied right to privacy explicit
I would be interested in reading more about how you imagine this might work.
To be up front, I don’t consider unencrypted messages on someone else’s server to be “private” at all; Snapchat can obviously see everything anyone sends unencrypted on their app. So, that’s where I’m starting from.
In this case it pertains to how the app spent years cultivating an atmosphere indicating discretion. That’s why last time I thought about it (a decade ago) it was mostly popular for sending nudes.
My position here is that the government has been pressuring private companies to give them all the warrantless data they want. And I think they shouldn’t be allowed to ask. Hell I think they should need a warrant to view surveillance data unless someone in the incident consents or the owner of the data is the accuser.
Now I acknowledge that those two paragraphs allow this situation. But I also think that we shouldn’t be holding a reasonable expectation of privacy to what a privacy advocate thinks, it should be what an ordinary citizen and user of a service thinks. In that case, either I’m old and out of touch since my sending tit pics over Snapchat days are long past (I am) and this woman had an atypical expectation of privacy. Or Snapchat isn’t properly expressing to users the degree of surveillance they’re under and this should be taken as private communication and Snapchat should be forced to either change their surveillance levels or work to ensure that the average user understands the level of surveillance they’re under.
So yeah I think this is mostly a consumer rights issue, but it’s also an issue of the government keeps asking for data on private citizens that they shouldn’t be allowed to collect themselves and I don’t think they should even be allowed to ask
If the government asks, they typically need a warrant. (There are exceptions, but they’re fairly narrow). Is there a specific example you’re thinking of?
This scenario, though, is Snapchat volunteering the information. It wouldn’t really make much sense to require the government to get a warrant to recieve a tip, would it?
And shouldn’t we applaud the practice? Sure, in this scenario it was a false positive, but if this student teacher were actually planning to do what she joked about and Snapchat sat on that information, I suspect many of the people poohpoohing Snapchat would be angry that they didn’t inform law enforcement.
I have no idea why people are using Snapchat in 2026; it was never as private or discreet as it pretended to be, as you could just take a picture of the “self deleting” message with another device. However, it sounds like people still using it need to demand E2EE direct messages. It worked for Facebook.
There’s a reason why Donald and his friends in Washington have all of their discussions on Signal.
Also, if you’re not already, just assume every app and device are spying on you.
Who the fuck still uses Snapchat?
Ditch that shit.
22YO, so yeah. That was probably peak Snapchat age for them.
I still use it with friends. Not because it’s private (it’s obviously not) and not because it’s good(it’s infested with ads) but because of the convenience of having the ability to send silly inconsequential videos and photos throughout the day without having to worry about that content consuming space on my device or having to go back and clean said content from my device. In that way I find it pretty convenient. That said, from a privacy standpoint it’s probably worse than most other options. Don’t use it with any expectations of privacy.
The statute is constructed in an unusual way because it doesn’t require that the threat is transmitted to someone who believes it. It says:
(a) A person commits disorderly conduct when he or she knowingly:
…
(3.5) Transmits or causes to be transmitted in any manner a threat of destruction of a school building or school property, or a threat of violence, death, or bodily harm directed against persons at a school, school function, or school event, whether or not school is in session;
Laws against transmitting threats are usually written in a manner that excludes jokes sent to friends who understand that they are jokes.
Also, use Signal. Signal will not call the cops when you send dumb jokes to your friends. There are no good reasons for most people to not use Signal.
dont threaten violence in a school setting online. you are guaranteed to face consequences
Might have been a joke
We are talking about the USA, I fucking hope they do not take school shooting threats as jokes!
How do you differentiate between a threat and a joke?
maybe so. but the way trumps just ice department is run, they have no sense of humor
Welcome to reality. Snapchat, WhatsApp, Facebook, intsagram, etc. They are not private. Just don’t use them. It’s wild how people are willfully ignorant about this.
This 100%. Everything you write on any of these chats, anything you write in email, anything you exchange digitally can be monitored if it is not end to end encrypted. People are way too ignorant about it. Just because you can’t search your chat history up on Google doesn’t mean you aren’t being tracked, recorded and monitored.
Literally no different than going to someone’s lawn they say is for public speech regardless and then getting arrested for inciting violence.
It’s PUBLIC. If you want privacy then do it via your own means.
This bullshit is getting out of hand.
I know it’s not nearly the same level, but over on reddit I participated in a thread. Nevermind full context, someone said something about “The first half of life [something]”, someone replied “and the second half of life [something]” and I jokingly said “And the third half of life, you’re dead.”
Couple replied to that - it was minorly amusing in context - and one of them said “Now I’m sad”. So I jokingly said “Well, good news is you won’t be sad when you’re dead”.
Within a few minutes, I got a warning from reddit and the comment removed.
So I appealed the warning (because if AI removes another comment, you get a 3 day suspension, then 7 day, then 30 day, then permanent), but also rephrased the commeny and basically make the joke while not even saying “dead”, but I also rolled my eyes at the reddit AI.
I almost immediately got a permanent ban.
THEN THE STUPIDEST BIT: They overturned the warning BUT KEPT THE PERMANENT BAN.
Fucking idiots.
Dont’ judge me for still spending some time on reddit, I mod a couple of places. THAT account is still going, but I also don’t use that account except to mod because of this bullshit with reddit that’s been getting worse.
