Here’s What’s New About Snapchat’s Updated Terms of Service

Snapchat has updated its terms of service to include some ominous clauses granting it the right to store and reuse your photos. Snapchat says that photos sent to individuals will still be deleted from Snapchat's servers once they're opened, but any content shared via My Story, Replay and Snapchat Live "may be available on our servers and a recipient's device after they've been viewed or expired."

The new terms, which went into effect on Wednesday, include the following:

You 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).

This, while terrifying in the abstract, is nothing new. Most social networks have similar clauses in their TOS, with Facebook and Instagram being two such examples. It's basically for potential use in marketing, but Snapchat also reserves the right to share your content with its business partners for publication outside of Snapchat. Again, this is not entirely out of the ordinary, but something Snapchat users should be apprised of.

Snapchat's new TOS—the entire support section is worth a gander—also includes an arbitration clause that effectively bars users from mounting a class-action lawsuit against the company, unless their suit meets a number of explicitly stated conditions. In part, in reads:

All claims and disputes arising out of, relating to, or in connection with the Terms or the use the Services that cannot be resolved informally or in small claims court will be resolved by binding arbitration on an individual basis, except that you and Snapchat are not required to arbitrate any dispute in which either party seeks equitable relief for the alleged unlawful use of copyrights, trademarks, trade names, logos, trade secrets, or patents.

So in the case of copyright or trademark infringement, you're cleared to sue. As Motherboard's resident legal buff Sarah Jeong reminded me, arbitration clauses like this are central to lawsuits against Uber. That clause was ruled "unconscionable" in a number of Uber cases, so class-action suits were allowed to proceed.

Snapchat does not want you to miss this arbitration clause, putting an all-caps message at the beginning of the terms to alert you that the clause is further down, and that you should read it. This is probably to prevent the clause from also potentially being ruled as "unconscionable," because Snapchat has done the extra legwork to let you know the clause is there.

Update: An earlier headline was not clear that the updated privacy does not apply to users' private snaps, which is how you'd probably send your nudes.