Snapchat gives messages to police

THE company behind the messaging app designed to give you privacy has admitted it has been passing Snapchats on to police. So how safe are your messages really?

All of a sudden that Snapchat logo looks untrustworthy and a little creepy.

THINK your Snapchats are private?

Think again.

The company admitted in a blog post yesterday that it has handed over numerous unopened Snapchats to the police over the past year, Gizmodo reported.

The app is designed to let you take an image or record a video, draw something on it, then send it to your Snapchat pal. The message will automatically disappear in 10 seconds or less.

The photos are deleted from its servers after they have been opened by its recipients.

But what about the unopened Snapchats? They remain on the company's servers - which are run by Google - for 30 days.

"Since May 2013, about a dozen of the search warrants we've received have resulted in us producing unopened Snaps to law enforcement," said Micah Schaffer, head of trust and safety at Snapchat. "That's out of 350 million Snaps sent every day."

So yes, handing over Snapchats to police is a rare occurrence but you might want to think twice what you're photographing and sending to your friends under the presumption of privacy.

But these are just the occurrences we're legally allowed to know about. NSA surveillance requests don't necessarily come via warrants so who knows how frequently other kinds of information is changing hands.

But now, there is also SnapHack. This new app lets you save Snapchat messages for later.