Snapchat says people should not be worried about its terms and conditions update

Fear was spread this weekend after Snapchat made a seemingly sinister update to its terms and conditions with the release of a new version of the app.

The new T&Cs appeared to suggest that the image-sharing app would be "stockpiling" users' photos - a suggestion the company has since denied.

According to the new terms, all users who agree to use the service 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).

• New T&Cs

As some websites pointed out, this was a drastic change from the older terms and conditions which stated "delete is our default".

That means that most messages sent through our Services will be automatically deleted once they have been viewed or have expired.

• Old T&Cs

However, on Monday morning, the app released a statement which explained it was not stockpiling user content and that the new terms and conditions were not much of a major update.

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.'

However, the statement did also contain this caveat:

It’s true that our Terms of Service grant us a broad license to use the content you create—a license that’s common to services like ours. 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).

Snapchat clarified that users are able to limit the scope of that license in their own privacy settings "so that your personal communications continue to remain truly personal".

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