Law enforcement guidelines

These Guidelines explain how Seldeo, Inc. responds to requests from government agencies, law enforcement, and courts (collectively, "Requestors") for information about Seldeo users and content on the Seldeo mobile app and this website.

Seldeo values user privacy and the rule of law. We will respond to lawful requests that identify the specific data sought, the specific user or account, and the specific legal authority relied on. We will resist overbroad, vague, or facially defective requests.

These Guidelines are not a substitute for legal process. Nothing here waives our right to raise legal objections, seek judicial review, or challenge a request that we believe is inconsistent with law.

1. Who Seldeo is

• Legal entity: Seldeo, Inc., a North Carolina corporation.
• Registered address: Durham, NC 27703, United States.
• Registered agent: Sabrina, Seldeo, Inc., Durham, NC 27703.
• Federal EIN: on file with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service.
• DMCA Designated Agent: Registration Number DMCA-1075525 with the U.S. Copyright Office.

Seldeo is a private, closely-held company. We are not a public communications common carrier, nor an "electronic communication service" as narrowly defined in some older U.S. wiretap-era statutes, but we treat ourselves as a "provider of electronic communication service" and "remote computing service" for purposes of 18 U.S.C. §§ 2510, 2701 (the Stored Communications Act, or SCA) so that our users receive the strongest applicable statutory protections.

2. How to submit a request

2.1 Preferred submission channel

• Email: privacy@seldeo.com
• Subject line: Law Enforcement Request – <case reference> – <jurisdiction>

2.2 Postal submission

If email is not possible, requests may be served by certified mail to:

Seldeo, Inc. Attn: Legal — Law Enforcement Response Durham, NC 27703 United States

2.3 Required elements of a request

Every request must include:

1. Requestor identity. Name of the requesting agency, unit, and the name, badge/ID number, direct phone number, and government email address of the responsible officer or attorney.
2. Legal basis. The specific legal authority — subpoena, court order, search warrant, national-security letter (with a redacted version usable in litigation), MLAT request, or preservation request.
3. Attached process. A scanned copy of the signed legal process.
4. Precise identification of the account(s) or content at issue:
   • Seldeo username, or
   • Seldeo user ID (UID), or
   • Verified email address or phone number linked to the account, and
   • For content: post ID, message ID, or URL.
5. Precise identification of the data sought (see the data-type matrix in §3).
6. Nature of the investigation. Enough context for us to evaluate the good-faith basis.
7. Non-disclosure or notification requests. Whether the request is accompanied by a valid non-disclosure order and, if so, its expiration date.
8. Return channel. Where and how you want the response delivered (agency-issued portal, government email, encrypted transfer, PGP key).

Requests that omit any of these elements will receive a request for clarification, not the requested data.

2.4 Language and jurisdiction

Requests must be in English or accompanied by a certified English translation. Requests from outside the United States must comply with the process in §6 (MLAT and equivalents).

2.5 Fees

Seldeo may charge reasonable fees to reimburse costs of responding to legal process where permitted by law (e.g., 18 U.S.C. § 2706 for SCA disclosures). Fee schedule available on request.

3. Legal process required for each data type

We respond to the legal process required by U.S. law, applied uniformly to all requestors. Foreign requests must generally proceed via mutual-legal-assistance channels (§6).

3.1 Basic subscriber information

• Legal process required: Subpoena, or higher.
• Data returned: Account creation date and IP; username, display name; email address or phone number of record; length of service; login/session type (email, phone, Apple, Google); IP addresses used to access the account for a limited historical window.

3.2 Non-content transaction records

• Legal process required: Court order under 18 U.S.C. § 2703(d), or higher (search warrant); grand-jury subpoena for federal criminal investigations.
• Data returned: Login/logout times and associated IPs; device identifiers used with the account; recipient/sender identifiers for messages, calls, and posts (not content); timestamps and metadata of user-generated content; non-content metadata about calls and messages (participants, duration, timestamps).

3.3 Stored content

• Legal process required: Search warrant issued on probable cause under Rule 41 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure or a state-law equivalent that meets the same standard.
• Data returned: Post, story, memorial, and message content stored on Seldeo servers, subject to Seldeo's retention windows in our Privacy Policy §6; profile content (avatar, bio, followers/followed lists as of the disclosure date).

3.4 Real-time interception ("wiretap") of content

• Legal process required: Title III wiretap order under 18 U.S.C. §§ 2510–2523 or a federal or state warrant meeting the same standard.
• Practical limitation: Seldeo does not currently have real-time-interception capability for user content. Where a valid wiretap order is served, we will confer with counsel and law enforcement to determine what implementation is technically feasible without creating a general capability that would exceed the scope of any single order.

3.5 Prospective location or geolocation data

• Legal process required: Search warrant issued on probable cause. We follow the reasoning of Carpenter v. United States, 138 S. Ct. 2206 (2018), which we apply broadly beyond CSLI.

4. Emergency requests

For emergencies involving danger of death or serious physical injury, Seldeo may disclose information under 18 U.S.C. § 2702(b)(8) and (c)(4) without a court order.

How to submit an emergency request:

• Email: privacy@seldeo.com, subject line: EMERGENCY DISCLOSURE REQUEST – <agency>.
• Use the standing Emergency Disclosure Request form:
  • PDF (fillable / printable): https://www.seldeo.com/legal/law-enforcement-emergency-form.pdf
  • HTML (browseable): https://www.seldeo.com/legal/law-enforcement-emergency-form.html
• Or provide the equivalent statement of:
  • The specific facts describing the emergency;
  • The specific individual(s) at risk;
  • The specific data required to address the emergency;
  • Confirmation that a subsequent legal process will follow if the emergency persists.
• Provide the direct phone number of the requesting officer.

Seldeo evaluates emergency requests in good faith. We may deny requests that appear to describe a routine investigation rather than an active emergency.

5. Preservation requests (18 U.S.C. § 2703(f))

We will preserve records associated with a specified account for 90 days, extendable once for a further 90 days on written request, pending legal process.

Submit preservation requests via privacy@seldeo.com with subject line Preservation Request – <case reference>. Include the account identifier and the reason for preservation (in general terms).

Preservation does not obligate us to disclose the preserved data; a lawful legal process is still required.

6. Requests from outside the United States

Seldeo processes almost all data in the United States. As a general matter:

• Formal criminal-investigation requests for content or transactional data from a foreign authority must proceed through:
  • A Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT) or bilateral executive agreement between the requesting country and the United States, or
  • The Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data Act (CLOUD Act) framework for countries with a bilateral CLOUD Act executive agreement (currently: the UK, Australia; more in negotiation), or
  • A letter rogatory from a foreign court, executed by a U.S. federal court.
• Requests from EU member states for content or non-content data must comply with the EU e-Evidence Regulation (2023/1543) framework, including Article 7 (transmission through a competent authority in the enforcing state) and Article 12 (notification and challenge rights).
• Emergency requests (danger of death or serious physical injury) will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis under §4 above, regardless of country of origin.

We may respond to foreign requests directly where doing so does not violate U.S. law, particularly the SCA. When U.S. law and the requesting country's law conflict, we generally require the requesting authority to satisfy the higher standard.

7. National-security process (United States)

• National Security Letters issued under 18 U.S.C. § 2709: we accept, and we do not disclose the fact of receipt except as permitted by law.
• FISA orders under 50 U.S.C. §§ 1801 et seq.: we accept where properly issued.
• Reporting: No transparency report has been published. Any future disclosure will be subject to applicable non-disclosure law, legal review, and a separately approved methodology; no publication cadence or statistics are promised.

Where a non-disclosure obligation attached to a national-security process expires or is lifted, we will provide affected users with as-timely-a-notice as is legally permissible.

8. User notification

Our default practice is to notify users before disclosing information in response to legal process, unless:

• We are legally prohibited from doing so (a court-ordered non-disclosure obligation).
• We reasonably believe that giving notice would create an imminent risk of harm to a person, or would result in destruction of evidence or flight from prosecution.
• The account belongs to a Seldeo staff member and gives us access to non-public Seldeo systems.

When we cannot notify at the time of disclosure, we will notify the affected user after the non-disclosure obligation expires or is lifted, unless doing so would still create harm.

9. Standards Seldeo applies

We will refuse a request that in our judgment is:

• Overbroad — for example, "all data associated with anyone who posted in a specific hashtag" without particularised suspicion.
• Facially defective — missing a signature, missing a docket number, addressed to the wrong entity, or expired.
• Not authorised by U.S. law — for example, a foreign order that has not gone through the MLAT / CLOUD Act channel and that would require disclosure prohibited by the SCA.
• Not likely to yield the requested data — for example, a request for the content of end-to-end encrypted messages, or content that was ephemeral and no longer exists.

Where we refuse a request or narrow its scope, we notify the requestor and explain the defect.

We may object in court to a request that we believe is inconsistent with law, is a fishing expedition, or would compromise the privacy of users beyond what the underlying investigation reasonably requires.

10. Data types Seldeo does not have

To manage expectations, Seldeo does not hold or retain:

• Contents of end-to-end encrypted communications, if E2EE messaging is enabled for the account. (E2EE is on the roadmap; the current state is server-visible messages, in which case §3.3 applies.)
• Call recordings of voice or video calls, unless a participant explicitly recorded and stored a call, in which case the recording is stored per the participant's choice.
• Financial-instrument data (full credit-card numbers, bank account numbers). Payments are processed by Apple / Google / Stripe; we hold only aggregate transaction metadata.
• Continuous background location. We collect location only at the moment a user asks for a location-tagged action.
• Contacts uploaded raw. Contact matching is performed against hashed identifiers; raw contact lists are not retained after matching.

11. Contact for law-enforcement personnel

Purpose	Contact
Legal-process submission	privacy@seldeo.com, subject Law Enforcement Request – …
Emergency disclosure	privacy@seldeo.com, subject EMERGENCY DISCLOSURE REQUEST – …
Preservation request	privacy@seldeo.com, subject Preservation Request – …
Postal address	Seldeo, Inc., Attn: Legal — Law Enforcement Response, Durham, NC 27703, USA
We do not promise a response time for requests. Emergency requests are reviewed based on the information provided and applicable law; requestors should use the emergency contact channel above.

12. Public-record disclosures

No aggregate law-enforcement statistics have been published. Any future public reporting will be subject to legal review and will not include information whose disclosure is prohibited or could compromise safety or an investigation.

13. Changes

We may update these Guidelines from time to time. The version number and effective date at the top of the page are updated on each material change. Older versions are archived and available on request from legal@seldeo.com.