Sixty minutes. That’s how long it took for a private Snapchat message to travel from Kristen Volpe’s phone to the FBI to the deputies standing in her elementary school hallway. On January 29, 2025, the 22-year-old student teacher at John L. Hensey Elementary in Washington, Illinois, vented to her boyfriend and two roommates — three people total — after a student closed her laptop mid-class and wiped her lesson plan. She referenced shooting the student or the school. She meant it as a frustrated joke. Snapchat’s algorithm didn’t get the humor.
No student reported her. No parent. No coworker. The flag was entirely automated. Snapchat’s policy permits voluntary emergency disclosures to law enforcement — no warrant required — when the platform determines imminent harm exists. The algorithm makes that initial call. Think of it like your Ring doorbell deciding to call 911 on its own, except the doorbell is reading your text messages.
So the lesson to the rest of us is DO NOT USE SNAPCHAT especially for private messaging.
I use Signal, was pressed to do so by privacy-minded friends and have pressed other friends to adopt the client.
So long as you don’t accidentally include Jeffrey Goldberg in your chat, you’re okay.
Questions for the ridiculous number of people on here who are perfectly willing to give up their right to privacy because you believe it makes schools and other places safer:
Have you read the 50+ page user agreement for your cell phone company? How about the user agreements of every app that has access to your cell phone, your PC mic or apps that have access to your files? Late model cars have microphones too, as do TV remotes. Microsoft has access to everything on your Windows PC. I’d give 100 to 1 odds that 99% of you haven’t read any of those user agreements OR the UA for private chat apps you are using. Likewise are you sure any cloud storage you’re using isn’t scanning your documents for forbidden phrases?
Since you haven’t read every word of each and every user agreement and think it keeps schools safe, you should be just fine with the fact that EVERYTHING you say or write may be available to law enforcement, even if you’re talking to yourself while sitting on the toilet in your home. If you mutter that you’d like to kill someone or burn something misheard as a school building to the ground you are just fine with AI flagging it and the police knocking on your door in an hour, right? You’ll also be just fine with losing your career and your job never being able to find another one, right? Right? After all, other people never know WTF someone dangerous and violent is going to do.
The number of people on here who are perfectly willing to give up all their rights and have their private communications monitored for something that is nothing more than security theater is unbelievable.
It’s HEARTENING to Know these Platforms have the ABILITY to STOP atrocities and Almost Always choose NOT too! <3
It’s a terrible thing that’s happened, but fuck gadgetreview for that shitty misleading clickbait headline.
Editor knew they wouldn’t get the same impact with “teacher posted in a group chat that they were going to shoot a student”, so “group” becomes “private” and the detail about the threat gets moved way down into the article body. This is a journal who clearly wants to tell you what to think.
Is it legal for a service to be called private when it is programmatically shared with law enforcement?
The duality of AI…one stops nonexistent threats another one happily puts you into danger
Marvel at how AI stopped this non-existent threat, while also giving advice on the best way to kill yourself, or get the highest kill score in a mass shooting, or hack into other corporations.
Sure, this tech isn’t ever going to start directly killing people it has determined are a problem, flipping off life support machines, crashing autonomous vehicles, etc.
And in any other country that may have been correctly classed as a joke, but in the US it ain’t a joke. What a dystopia
There’s a reason why Donald and his friends in Washington have all of their discussions on Signal.
Also, if you’re not already, just assume every app and device are spying on you.
Very disturbing, it was the last straw to switch my chats (besides family) to Signal.
I had held onto Telegram for years because of their fun animated stickers, but yesterday discovered that Signal has those too, actually all sets from Telegram are available on unofficial Signal sticker sites, so now I’m all sorted 😅
Welcome to post Constitution USA.
Who the fuck still uses Snapchat?
Ditch that shit.
The statute is constructed in an unusual way because it doesn’t require that the threat is transmitted to someone who believes it. It says:
(a) A person commits disorderly conduct when he or she knowingly:
…
(3.5) Transmits or causes to be transmitted in any manner a threat of destruction of a school building or school property, or a threat of violence, death, or bodily harm directed against persons at a school, school function, or school event, whether or not school is in session;
Laws against transmitting threats are usually written in a manner that excludes jokes sent to friends who understand that they are jokes.
Also, use Signal. Signal will not call the cops when you send dumb jokes to your friends. There are no good reasons for most people to not use Signal.
One of my friends is some sort of neurodivergent and just… won’t install signal. It’s “too much”. I don’t understand this. It’s 30 seconds of “click this link I sent you, then click install”.
What (if anything) does that friend use for messaging?
WhatsApp, sms, and Google chat (hangouts? Meet? The thing built into Gmail)
None of them are great.
It would be less surprising to me from someone who doesn’t understand how computers work at all and only wants to use SMS. It’s weird from someone who already uses several messaging apps.
Shout-out to all the Americans still claiming that they are more democratic than whatever other country. I take great pleasure in seeing the shit hole your country is and is still becoming. ❤️
take great pleasure in seeing the shit hole your country is and is still becoming. ❤️
That’s a pretty weird thing to take pleasure in, right? Wouldn’t you want the whole world to snap out of it and become better/united?
We have lost more people to gun violence in the last thirty years than every US soldier killed in every war. Death by firearm is now the number one killer of US children. I have personally lost several people I grew up with to gun violence.
Almost 50% of US males have a criminal conviction and minorities have a close to a 30% felony conviction rate. Millions of minority and poor families have been destroyed by the war on drugs. People regularly get convicted of crimes they didn’t do because they are manipulated into plea bargains with the threat of massive time behind bars. The US jails more people per capita than just about any other nation.
The unemployment rate for those under thirty is around 40%. Most working class families are priced out of home ownership and going to get a higher education will often indebt you for decades. You are expected to constantly change careers or you will be quickly left behind with median position length of just under four years. Many Americans have up to ten or more jobs in their lifetime due to instability in our economy.
I raised my family for over twenty years with zero health insurance. Going to the hospital is a financially life ending event with bills easily reaching $10k + for even basic procedures unless it is just a few stitches. Medical bills account for 40% of bankruptcies and half a million people go bankrupt every year from medical debt.
I find it amazing propaganda can manipulate rubes so easily into hating each other. The wealthy have truly won.
It’s always been a shithole. The good part was the freedom, you used to be able to be exhasperated and complain to your friends. But we decided instead of improving society that some of us would rather give a bunch of facists cameras and microphones and turns out, those facists are the evil kind of facists, not this mythical “only here to protect us” kind.
Time to tell everyone to uninstall their apps… Oh, wait. We already did that.
