Snapchat (Photo : Reuters)
Snapchat's reputation has already been damaged after several security issues, but it recently published a transparency report detailing how many legal requests were made to obtain user information, and is now pushing back third-party apps to increase privacy.
The new report from Snapchat covers requests made between November 2014 and February 2015. What is particularly surprising is that more than 375 government requests have been made for private user information, 92 percent of which were complied with.
Requests outside the U.S. came mostly from the United Kingdom, and had one out of 10 requests complied with.
However, the requests did not ask for users' private pictures of their genitals as many have feared. The figure released by Snapchat does not include requests made by security firms as it can only be disclosed to the public after six months have passed.
What is interesting, however, is that France also requested for Snapchat data, but was declined nine times as it asked, according to Engadget.
Snapchat was in deep water in the later part of 2014 when hackers exploited a third-party Snapchat photo sharing app that resulted in the leakage of thousands of sexually explicit images.
The four-year-old app defended themselves saying that the attackers did not directly hack them. Snapchat also said that it does not allow public access to its code to be modified, but third-party devs managed to obtain the data and develop their own apps, according to Tech Spot.
Now, Snapchat is continually blocking third-party apps that utilize its own API. They are now using a method that keeps out the unwanted apps to avoid repeating the mistake in 2014.
