COMPANY PROFILE

Snap

Headquarters: Santa Monica, United States · Founded: 2011 · Listed: NYSE: SNAP

1 fine or sanction1 data breach

What it does and how it makes money

Snap Inc. is the US company that owns Snapchat, a messaging app for photos and videos, stories and maps, and the Spectacles glasses. It offers the app free to users and sells advertising to advertisers.

Most of its revenue comes from advertising on Snapchat, plus subscriptions such as Snapchat+. ^[1]

What data it collects about you

According to its privacy policy, it collects account data (name, username, email, phone, birthday), app usage, content and its metadata, device data and advertising identifiers, location by IP or GPS if allowed, contacts if permitted, cookies, and data from advertisers and third parties. It uses interests inferred from this data to personalise and measure ads. ^[2]

How it turns your data into money

Snap earns substantially all of its revenue from advertising (about 87% in 2025) and picks which ad to show you using real-time and historical attributes and activity. According to its ads privacy page, it learns (and sometimes guesses) what you might be interested in from your activity on Snapchat, determines your approximate location and collects information about your device; it also receives data from advertisers and partners through the Snap Pixel and its Conversions API, small bits of code embedded in third-party sites and apps, and advertisers may upload customer lists that are matched against a hashed version of your phone number or email to target you or reach people like their customers. Its own examples: if you engage with racing content it might guess you are an 'Automotive Enthusiast', and if you search for a movie on a website that shares data with Snap you may see ads for similar movies. It uses that partner data to give advertisers reports about the effectiveness of their ads and says it does not share information that directly identifies you, like a name, phone number or email address. ^[3]

Where it is incorporated

Snap Inc. is a Delaware corporation with principal executive offices at 3000 31st Street, Santa Monica, California; its Class A shares trade on the New York Stock Exchange (SNAP) but carry no voting rights unless required by Delaware law: as of December 31, 2025 its co-founders control over 99% of the voting power. It was named Snapchat Inc. until 2016 and in January 2017 set up an international headquarters in Soho, London. ^[1]

Taxes and low-tax countries

Its FY2022 10-K subsidiaries exhibit lists nine entities: Snap LLC (Nevada), Snap Group Limited, Snap International I Limited and Snap International II Limited (United Kingdom), Snap Intermediate Inc. (Delaware), Snap Group SAS (France), Snap Aus Pty Ltd (Australia), Snap ULC (Canada) and Snap Camera GmbH (Germany); no subsidiaries in Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands or the Cayman Islands are listed. ^[4]

Money

5,931.4 million USDRevenue 2025 ^[5]

460.5 million USDNet loss 2025 ^[5]

5,261Employees (2025) ^[1]

Fines and sanctions

FTC · United States · December 2014
Settlement with the FTC for deceiving users: messages did not disappear as promised, contacts and location were collected without notice or consent, and weak security allowed 4.6 million usernames and phone numbers to leak. No fine; requires a privacy programme with independent audits for 20 years. These are the FTC's allegations, resolved by settlement. Settlement announced on 8 May 2014; final order in December 2014, in force for 20 years. ^[6]

Data breaches and hacks

December 20134,600,000 people affected
A group published usernames and phone numbers (last two digits hidden) obtained through a flaw in the Find Friends feature. Snap said message content was not accessed. ^[7]

Ask it to delete your data

This is the page the company itself gives to ask it to delete your data or stop selling it: Open its page ^[8]

With GUARDIANA or GUARDIANA ZERO, you download from this same profile the letter asking it to delete your data, under your country’s law, ready to attach to an email.

Its website

https://www.snap.com/

Does this company follow you? GUARDIANA ZERO, GUARDIANA’s browser, cuts its connections and shows you how many times it tried. Meet GUARDIANA ZERO →

Sources

What this profile does NOT say

It does not say this company does anything illegal. The only thing it states about anyone’s legality is what a regulator or a court has already decided, with the date and the link to the source.
It does not say what data of yours it holds: only the company knows, which is why you have the right to ask it.
If you are this company and a fact is wrong, write to hola@guardianagroup.com and it will be corrected, with its date.

Public facts with their sources, checked on October 12, 2026. All profiles →