Snapchat wants to clear up some things about its new ToS

The company says it's still deleting Snaps, and is only licensing content from Live Stories

Last week Snapchat updated its Privacy Policy and it Terms of Service and the Internet, as it is known to do from time to time, had a collective freakout.

Here's collection of headlines: Snapchat's New Terms & Conditions May Be Infringing On Your Privacy; Snapchat Updated Terms Of Service Let Snapchat Do Whatever It Likes With Your Selfies; Snapchat's updated terms of service and privacy policy creep users out; and Snapchat now owns your photos, even after they disappear.

That's some pretty scary stuff. But Snapchat is here to tell you that everything is going to be just fine.

"There’s been some confusion about the updated Privacy Policy and Terms of Service we rolled out last week. We never want to create any misunderstanding over our commitment to protecting your privacy," the company wrote in a blog post.

What was worrying people were passages like this one, which seem to grant Snapchat access to user content, the same content that it had always said was being deleted from its servers:

"You grant Snapchat a worldwide, perpetual, royalty-free, sublicensable, and transferable license to host, store, use, display, reproduce, modify, adapt, edit, publish, create derivative works from, publicly perform, broadcast, distribute, syndicate, promote, exhibit, and publicly display that content in any form and in any and all media or distribution methods (now known or later developed)"

That certianly makes it sound as though Snapchat is storing content, but, no, it says, it is still not doing that.

"First off, we want to be crystal clear: The Snaps and Chats you send your friends remain as private today as they were before the update. Our Privacy Policy continues to say—as it did before—that those messages 'are automatically deleted from our servers once we detect that they have been viewed or have expired,'" it wrote.

Of course, it admits that users can simply save Snaps, something that the company recently decided to make much easier thanks to paid replays, but Snaps are deleted from servers as soon as the are read.

The only thing that Snapchat said it will use the license for is for Live Stories, which are a curated stream of user submitted Snaps from various locations and events. Users who have their location services on at the same event location will be given the option to contribute Snaps to the Live Story.

"We need that license when it comes to, for example, Snaps submitted to Live Stories, where we have to be able to show those Stories around the world—and even replay them or syndicate them (something we’ve said we could do in previous versions of our Terms and Privacy Policy)," the company said.

Besides, it said, while "It’s true that our Terms of Service grant us a broad license to use the content you create," it also "a license that’s common to services like ours."

Indeed it is, and its one that has caused trouble for other services as well, including Instagram and Facebook.

In 2012, Instagram updated its privacy policy page to say that it would be sharing user data with Facebook so that pictures uploaded to Instagram could be used in advertisement on the service without user permission.

The backlash was fierce and it was so bad, in fact, that Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom actually wrote a blogpost apologizing to users, and saying that the company would be reverting back to its original terms of service.

Every since Snapchat debuted there have been questions about whether or not it was actually deleting the content that its user sent, problems that were likely exacerbated by scandals, including one in which nude photos and videos were leaked onto the Internet last year. Though that was caused by the hacking of a third party service, it still feed the perception that your content is not as safe as you think it is. (You'd think by now, with all of the data breaches going on, that they'd be more careful).

Ultimately all of this comes down the individual user, how comfortable they feel on the service, and how much they trust that Snapchat really is deleting their content.

(Image source: funnyjunk.com)