Chinese firms are generally required under threat of arrest to store and/or transmit all data on users. A single Chinese firm failing to delete data would have little or no negative impact within China given that they’re probably already secretly required to do exactly this. Do you mean US customer impact?

It is best to never have any Chinese company store your data. They are by law (and under severe penalties) required to make all data in their possession available to government officials at any time that it is requested. Dictatorships are like that.

Nothing in those articles suggest that Snapchat purged user data.

> “resolved most of those concerns over the past year by improving the wording of our privacy policy, app description, and in-app just-in-time notifications.”

Snapchat just changed their messaging to quell user concerns. Once they have a critical mass of users, they are immune to disclosing that Snapchat messages are not truly ephemeral.