We promised that we would continue to improve the security and reliability of our service and today we’re announcing a change in the way we treat third-party applications.

Our Campus Story was the natural evolution of the Our Story product that we launched at EDC this year. Our team heard tons of requests for Our Story at college campuses – so we just had to make it happen.

The best advertisements tell you more about stuff that actually interests you. Some companies spend a lot of time and collect a lot of data about you to figure that out. The product we’re releasing today is a lot simpler. An advertisement will appear in your Recent Updates from time to time, and you can choose if you want to watch it. No biggie. It goes away after you view it or within 24 hours, just like Stories.

Over the past few days we’ve fielded a number of questions about our API and third-party applications after a website that offered to save Snaps indicated that their database had been breached. We are grateful that the service provider acknowledged that Snapchat was never compromised, but we wanted to use this as an opportunity to reiterate the unfortunate threats these third-party applications can pose to our community.

Today is a big day for us - we are launching our first product created in partnership with another company. We’re huge fans of the folks at Square and have been big admirers of Square Cash since it launched – just type a dollar amount into the subject line of an email and send cash to friends. Genius!

Today we’re expanding our favorite new product - Our Story - to cover more live events!

We’ve had a lot of fun drawing up new filters for special locations in Los Angeles and New York. Swipe right on the preview screen to check them out – they’ll change depending on which neighborhoods you’re in!

Snapchat has always been about sharing your point of view. That’s why our application opens straight into the camera. It’s the fastest way to share little moments with our friends – to let them know where we are or how we feel right now. We built Our Story so that Snapchatters who are at the same event location can contribute Snaps to the same Story.

Today we entered into an agreement with the Office of the Attorney General of Maryland that—like our recent agreement with the Federal Trade Commission—strengthens Snapchat’s already strong commitment to our users’ privacy.

When we started building Snapchat, we were focused on developing a unique, fast, and fun way to communicate with photos. We learned a lot during those early days. One of the ways we learned was by making mistakes, acknowledging them, and fixing them. One of those was being more precise with how we communicated with the Snapchat community. This morning we entered into a consent decree with the FTC that addresses concerns raised by the commission.