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.
The headline of this article should have mentioned the reason her communication was flagged was because she mentioned shooting the student or the school. When you send a text, or Snapchat message, you are stripping out a wide range of non-verbal communication including intent and seriousness. So when someone sends a message with the comment that they might shoot a student or the school there is no way to judge these things. The last thing Snapchat wants or needs is an actual school shooting occurring that can be traced back to the shooter actually mentioning their intent to do so on their platform. With no way to judge intent Snapchat had to have a way to address these concerns. If an actual shooting was prevented then Snapchat would be lauded. Otherwise it’s spun like this article implying it’s a breach of privacy.
The world with social media is much different than the world before it. It’s changed the way people think, the types of things they think about and what they consider important. It therefore changes the way they act. Combine this with the ever growing surveillance state that intentionally wants to manipulate us and is able to do so at scale and speed and we find ourselves in the giant and dangerous mess we’re in now.
It IS a breach of privacy.
Few people who use these apps expect to be surveiled. That may make them ignorant, but that doesn’t change that this is a breach of their privacy.
Except Snapchat doesn’t have to surveil its customers and we really don’t want it to.
Does Apple surveil iMessages? Does your cell carrier need to monitor your text messages? Does it listen to your calls to see if you make terroristic threats?
Some bad things might be prevented if we “listened in” to all communications and then triggered a police response when something alarming was said. But doing so is ripe for abuse by those in power as well and that’s why warrants are required before surveillance and the invasion of your privacy is allowed. No warrant was necessary here because Snapchat makes you accept the surveillance under its terms of use, which all apps and cell carriers could technically do. And your Amazon Alexas. We don’t want that. Without privacy you don’t have freedom.