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.
We can thank school shooters for this invasion of privacy.
Ultimately we can thank lack of gun control for this invasion of privacy.
So if your freedoms end where mine begin, then we can thank the NRA and 2A nuts for this lack of freedom. Not that there really is any freedom anyway.
We can thank authoritarianism for this invasion of privacy. It would have happened with our without school shooters.
The first documented school shooting in the US was in the 1920s. While they were not as prevalent, they continued happening and climbing. Then the 90s got way worse, the 2000s even worse. So, mass surveillance has been on the rise just like school shootings have been on the rise. Now read your comment again and see if it makes any sense.