How does Snapchat handle law enforcement requests for content stored in My Eyes Only?

1. How Snapchat describes its cooperation with police: formal requests and legal thresholds

Snap’s public-facing safety and law‑enforcement pages emphasize that the company “honors formal requests from law enforcement” and will “respond in compliance with applicable law and privacy requirements” once the validity of a request is established, and that the SCA (Electronic Communications Privacy laws) constrains which records can be produced under which type of process (subpoena, court order, warrant) ^{[1] [2] [3] [6]}.

2. What Snap says about My Eyes Only specifically—Snap cannot decrypt it

Multiple iterations of Snapchat’s law‑enforcement guide and archived copies state that Memories content placed into “My Eyes Only” is encrypted and “not accessible to Snap” and “cannot be decrypted by Snap,” making Snap unable to produce decrypted My Eyes Only content from its servers ^{[4] [5]}.

3. Practical implications for law enforcement requests targeting My Eyes Only

Because Snap asserts it cannot decrypt My Eyes Only, the company’s typical route—producing account records and any stored content it can access in response to legal process—does not yield the unencrypted contents of My Eyes Only from Snap itself; law enforcement seeking that plaintext would therefore need alternative avenues not described in Snap’s public guides, such as obtaining the data from the user’s unlocked device, user consent, or other forensic means, but Snap’s materials do not enumerate or endorse those techniques ^{[4] [5] [7]}.

4. Exceptions and user‑notice policies: preservation, emergency disclosures, and notification

Snap will attempt to preserve account records upon receipt of preservation requests under 18 U.S.C. § 2703(f) and may respond to emergency disclosures when it believes disclosure is necessary to prevent death or serious physical harm, and the company operates a user‑notice policy that may notify users of legal process subject to legal exceptions ^{[1] [3] [6] [7]}. These procedures apply to account records and producible content but, again, do not change the company’s stated technical inability to decrypt My Eyes Only content stored in Memories ^{[4] [5]}.

5. Tensions, alternative viewpoints, and limits of available reporting

There is a tension between legal compulsion and technical limits: Snap’s transparency and law‑enforcement guides present a legal compliance posture—Snap will comply with valid process and preserve data—but they simultaneously claim a technical barrier for My Eyes Only that prevents direct production of its plaintext ^{[1] [4] [5]}. Independent reporting or government filings could show cases where law enforcement nonetheless obtained such content via device forensics, compelled passwords, or user cooperation, but the provided Snap documents do not describe those downstream methods or how often they succeed; therefore the public Snap materials establish Snap’s position but do not fully map real‑world investigative workarounds ^{[7] [5] [6]}.

6. Bottom line and what’s not answered by these sources

The authoritative materials from Snap make two clear claims: Snap will comply with valid legal process and preserve/produce what it legally can, and My Eyes Only items are encrypted such that Snap cannot decrypt or directly hand over their contents ^{[1] [2] [4] [5]}. What remains unclear from these documents—and not settled by the sources provided—is how often law enforcement obtains My Eyes Only content by other means (forensic access to devices, compelled disclosure of passcodes, or cooperation from users) or how courts interpret the interplay of compelled production and user encryption in specific cases; those are questions beyond the scope of Snap’s public guides ^{[7] [6]}.