This keeps going around but it's simply not true...
For snaps that are not saved, those are not retained on any server after their expiration.
Why would snap spend the money and/or hold the liability of keeping expired snaps stored... They know if it was all leaked they'd be done. And with the number of daily snaps, that would add up storage costs real fast or no reason.
> This keeps going around but it's simply not true
How do you know?
> Why would [...]
Because you can't think of a reason it must not be true? Or are you claiming internal knowledge or taking the company's word for it? I don't know for sure what's retained, and therefore I won't go around saying I know.
I'm half-joking here, but one reason we might know it isn't true is the "argument from cash flow": Snap is still hemorrhaging money, to the consternation of investors, mainly because they're paying astronomical sums to Google for GCE hosting. Given the amount of data that passes through Snapchat every day and the cost to host it, I can make a decent guess that they're not hanging on to it, or else their infrastructure costs would be even greater.
Their costs is already in the hundreds of million of dollars. They could hang on to all videos with no issue whatsoever. That's financially easily doable within their budget, and that's technically easily doable because google storage will take any amount of TB thrown at it.
The only fair assumption is that they store all videos. Remember that they are an ad business.
If it's too annoying, the wise decision would be to cut storage to only 1 month, or store only 1% of randomly selected videos. It will never be to stop storing videos.
choosing not to store the data is different than it being unencrypted in transit. nothing stops snapchat from building an internal "product" that captures, say, messages with certain geolocation, or comments, or, hell, based on some sort of image recognition system. Nothing stops the government from subpoening them asking for this functionality (see lavabit 1.0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavabit#Suspension_and_gag_ord... )