Until now, messages were automatically deleted either 24 hours after being viewed by everyone in a chat or 31 days after being sent. With Infinite Retention, users can choose which conversations to preserve, and all participants are notified whenever the setting is activated.

The update also brings “Group Streaks,” enabling multiple friends to contribute to a shared streak. Previously, streaks were limited to one-on-one interactions, requiring daily exchanges between two people. 

Group Streaks continue as long as most members participate, and if a streak is broken, it can be restored within a week. “We’ve often heard from our community that Snapchatters want to save their chats forever and wish they could build streaks with their favourite groups,” the company said in a statement.

Infinite Retention can be toggled on or off for each chat, and both parties receive notifications when the feature is enabled or disabled. This ensures users maintain control over which conversations remain permanent while keeping other interactions ephemeral.

Snapchat originally built its reputation on disappearing messages, but this update aligns the platform more closely with traditional messaging apps like WhatsApp and iMessage. 

The change comes when competition from TikTok, Instagram Threads, and Discord is increasing, as Snap aims to boost engagement and time spent in chats, a key metric for advertisers.

Via Infinite Retention, Snapchat is now joining a trend in social apps, offering users flexibility in how they communicate, blending permanent and ephemeral messaging. Signal and Telegram have long provided disappearing messages with optional permanence, and Snapchat’s latest features bring it firmly into this hybrid messaging space.

• Instagram is the least private app online, with direct messages having low encryption and providers having access to all DM content.
• Messaging apps are the most vulnerable to privacy breaches, both from government and tech companies, with message services making up half of the top 10.
• Dropbox is the least protected cloud storage platform, with only service-side encryption.

Apple has just earned a win for end-to-end encryption, with the UK government dropping its demands for a ‘back door’ to user data.

However, a new study by a proxy company, Webshare, analyzed reliability and safety across the most popular platforms to identify the least private apps.

The analysis created a comprehensive, cross-category privacy index ranking widely used digital services, including VPNs, messaging apps, email providers, and cloud storage platforms, by both their technical privacy protections and their real-world resilience to government access demands.

The final index quantifies encryption coverage, transparency of the parent company, metadata collection, jurisdiction risk, as well as previous privacy breach incidents, and the extent of governmental access.

Instagram is the least private app online, with direct messages having low encryption and providers having access to all DM content.

The encryption covers about 30% of all activity, with no EE2E safety feature by default, while the provider has full access to the content of messages. Governments can also easily gain access to both the content and the metadata collected by Meta.

Dropbox ranks second, with a risk score of 85, 10 points below Instagram DMs. It is the most vulnerable cloud storage, providing end-to-end encryption to only 30% of all data stored, similar to Instagram.

Its transparency in questions of safety and data access is a little better than for Meta, but is still low, getting an index of 25.

OneDrive shares the score of 85 with Dropbox, having the same problems in ensuring data safety and getting third place. It shares similar statistics to Dropbox, collecting 6 different metadata categories and having 2 major incidents related to data safety.

Outlook ranks 4th on the list of the least private apps, with a similar score of 85. The only email platform on the list, Outlook, offers server-side information protection only, and Microsoft can access content with a warrant.

The company also collects extensive metadata from its users in addition to enterprise telemetry and subscriber records.

Messenger is fifth in the ranking of the least secure apps and platforms, scoring 80. It protects 60% of all data, twice as much as Outlook or Instagram DMs, but collects even more metadata from its users.

The metadata includes contacts, interactions, and IP addresses of the users. Its parent company, Meta, shows a history of compliance with US governmental demands.

Telegram, another messaging service, follows closely behind Messenger, with a score of 75. The encryption extends only to half of all personal data, but the app has fewer incidents than Messenger or Instagram DMs.

Telegram also saves metadata up to 12 months, and can disclose information to authorities upon governmental requests.

WhatsApp earns seventh position on the list of the least private apps, with a data burden score of 65. The encryption is much stronger in WhatsApp than on Telegram or Messenger, protecting 95% of all data with end-to-end encryption.

At the same time, the transparency reports are limited in their scope, and the metadata is shared with the parent company, Meta.

In eighth place is iCloud, with a score of 60. Apple was just able to resist UK backdoor demands, but the cloud platform still struggles with data safety, including retention of metadata and some of the data remaining unencrypted.

iMessage is ninth, with a score of 50. The data encryption on this messaging platform is pretty strong, protecting 90%, but still below WhatsApp’s safety measures. iMessage shares the statistics with iCloud, with data safety protocols developed by Apple.

ExpressVPN closes the ranking of the least private apps and platforms, with tenth place and a score of 25. The only VPN on the list shows much stronger safety protocols than most apps in the ranking, but it still has a track record of data safety incidents.

In addition, it still collects metadata from its users, even though limited to a single category about billing and account settings.

A spokesperson from Webshare commented on the study:

“Apple’s successful resistance to UK government demands for encryption backdoors sets an important precedent for how tech companies can push back against overreaching surveillance policies. This development may encourage other technology companies to adopt more assertive stances against weakening encryption standards. It is especially important for social media and media services that handle intimate personal data while offering minimal security safeguards. The precedent may encourage other technology companies to prioritize user privacy, helping to bridge the gap between the sensitivity of information users share and the level of protection they rightfully deserve.”

To tackle this, Series has launched its AI-powered social platform that’s reinventing how college students connect, securing $3M in pre-seed funding to create a network built on meaningful relationships 

The team raised $3M in funding for its pre-seed round led by Parable (former a16z investor, Anne Lee Skates) with participation from Pear VC, Tim Draper’s DGB.VC, 47th Street (Jaren Glover, ex-Robinhood), Radicle Impact, Uncommon Projects, and notable angels, including the CEO of Reddit (Steve Huffman), the founder of GPTZero (Edward Tian), and others. 

The funding journey reads like a startup fairy tale: just two weeks ago, co-founder Nathaneo Johnson posted a trailer on LinkedIn about Series that went viral in the college entrepreneurial community. 

After an initial Zoom call with Anne Lee Skates (who started her fund after leaving a16z), Johnson and co-founder Sean Hargrow – both juniors at Yale – immediately flew to Silicon Valley to begin fundraising. What happened next defied conventional startup timelines for college founders: they closed their round in just 14 days.

Series is the first networking platform that uses AI Friends to make warm, double opt-in introductions across different networks. These AI Friends operate directly in iMessage and become personalized towards each user, making intros autonomously or on demand. 

Unlike existing platforms, Series creates connections only when there’s mutual value on both sides – eliminating the biases perpetuated by follower counts and engagement metrics. The platform requires a .edu email to join, creating a trusted ecosystem where students text their AI Friend about themselves and who they know, receiving a minimalist profile showcasing their warm network.

“The problem of quantifying value online isn’t a recent development – it started with Facebook back in ’04. Not to say these platforms don’t build great communities, but they embody the narrative that online metrics equate to real world value” said Nathaneo Johnson, co-founder & CEO of Series. 

“We’re 6’5”, Black, and technical – a direct foil to the Harvard story. And that difference is the reason Series tells a new story of how people connect online.”

Series’ revolutionary approach addresses a fundamental issue in modern social networking: people rely on biased guesswork and social proof to decide whom to connect with, and over time, making connections feels like charity. 

The company’s solution is an AI system that intelligently identifies potential matches based on genuine mutual benefit – no likes, followers, or vanity metrics – just smart, agentic networking where much of Gen Z already lives: iMessage.

The company’s journey began with The Founder Series Podcast, where founders Nathaneo Johnson and Sean Hargrow interviewed Yale entrepreneurs, accumulating over 500k views. 

This evolved into a viral web chatbot that facilitated curated introductions based on mutual value, gaining immediate traction at Yale and Princeton. With the official launch of Series in 2025, the platform has already recorded over 32,000 messages sent and received by AI Friends.

The platform’s ability to create natural human connections through AI has already resonated with early users: “I forgot it (the AI friend) wasn’t a real person. That was until I connected to a real person in the form of a minimalist profile my AI Friend (Oliver) had texted me. It was awesome,” reported Rich Zou, a student at Northeastern who uses Series for hosting hackathons.

“Once we capture the college entrepreneurial market, we’ll expand to finance, dating, education, health, and more. All of these fields in the student space rely on trust, access, and social capital,” explained Johnson. 

“Our long-term vision is to become the largest and most accessible warm network for just about anything – one billion AI Friends in the next decade. Social connection is broken; we’re rebuilding it with AI that acts like a well-connected friend in your pocket making connections to who you need, when you need, IRL.”

RCS is the new standard of messaging that provides a native, “brand-safe” environment, turning messaging into an interactive, actionable, feature-rich experience, including rich media, high-resolution images, videos, chatbots, file transfer, payment, location sharing and much more.

RCS brings the functionality of rich messaging apps like iMessage, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp directly into mobile phones without having to download any third-party app.

The Rich Messaging campaigns have been launched using OTM’s creative services and proprietary mobile advertising technology Mobucks.

The news follows the launch of the partnership between OTM and MTN Nigeria announced last July, aimed at strengthening the mobile operator’s digital advertising strategy by driving advertiser interaction and engagement with its 65 million subscribers through this highly engaging, extremely interactive, and brand-safe digital messaging format.

The first ground-breaking Rich Messaging campaigns have been launched with mega-brands such as Unilever Nigeria, the World Health Organization (WHO) and FilmOne Entertainment for movies like Dr. Strange and Wildflower. 

The campaigns yielded ground-breaking results with average engagement rates of 58% and average attention-based value of 26 seconds.

These are ground-breaking results compared to the attention-based value of other formats, such as banners with 0.1 seconds, video ads with 4.9 seconds, social media ads with 1.6 seconds, and TV with 13.8 seconds, putting Rich Messaging at the forefront of advertising and media.

Kerstin Trikalitis, Co-Founder and CEO, OTM, says: “It is rewarding to see how our growing partnership with MTN Nigeria is bearing fruit, working with leading brands to show the truly innovative and ground-breaking opportunities for RCS with Rich Messaging as a new media channel. Nigerian consumers are whole-heartedly embracing the opportunities brought by our unique, end-to-end, cloud-based and fully-managed Rich Messaging solution.”

“Our proprietary technology platform, Mobucks takes full advantage of this new media channel allowing users to interact with brands in an unprecedented way. It produces a rich experience not yet seen in the marketplace and generates a highly effective return on investment for brands.”

Lunga Mooi, Media and Digital Hub Director, Unilever, reveals his enthusiasm about Unilever brands, such as Closeup and Pepsodent, “embracing the opportunities to reach Nigerian consumers in ever more interesting ways and achieve unprecedented engagement rates than is possible with other formats.”

Both campaigns achieved outstanding results with Closeup hitting a ground-breaking engagement rate of 60% and attention-based value of 27 seconds, Pepsodent 57% engagement rate and 25 seconds as attention-based value.

FilmOne campaign witnessed equally successful results: 60% engagement rate and 29 seconds of attention value. Moses Babatope, Co-Founder and Managing Director, FilmOne Entertainment, states: “Over the years, embracing technologically innovative solutions has been a crucial part of our strategy for development. Hence, OTM’s pioneering sophisticated mobile advertising solution was a no-brainer to consider. We are excited to explore this medium that engages with our customers effectively.”

Lynda Saint-Nwafor, the Chief Enterprise Business Officer (CEBO) at MTN Nigeria, says: “The FilmOne, WHO and Unilever Nigeria campaigns ran by Out There Media and MTN Nigeria demonstrate the value of RCS for mobile customers and brands alike. By using innovative solutions like Mobucks, we can keep Nigerians connected and engaged with their favourite brands, and also informed about valuable health information.”

Out There Media now not only enables MTN Nigeria to bring subscribers targeted, interactive messaging and rich media experiences from its chosen brand and agency partners, but also harnesses the power of RCS in Nigeria.