Operationalizing and Scaling Snap's Privacy Architecture

To support the growing global Snapchat community, it was imperative for Snap to scale up their privacy program to ensure that privacy standards are consistently applied across Snap's products and services, while expanding into new geographies with continuing user growth. Snap's privacy program that started with manual checklists and inter-personal follow-ups had to mature rapidly through automation and standardization given Snap's growing community and in the face of increasing regulatory privacy requirements.

Over the years, we developed internal tooling that efficiently applies consistent privacy standards across all products at Snap. This includes a privacy review tool that provides an easy-to-use interface for product teams to engage with the privacy team on requirements, a data cataloging tool that creates and maintains a catalog of “what data is stored where” for Exabytes of data, an access control tool that gates who can access what data, to a data deletion tool that ensures data correctly expires at the end of its lifecycle. In this talk, we will discuss Snap's journey of operationalizing and scaling our privacy architecture.