Law enforcement and legal requests

Where to send legal process

Send subpoenas, court orders, search warrants and preservation requests to legal@frendivo.com. Include the issuing agency or court, a case number, a contact name with a phone number we can verify independently, and the email address of every Frendivo account involved.

Frendivo is a U.S. service. We respond to legal process valid under U.S. law. Requests from other countries must come through a Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty or another lawful U.S. process.

What we require

We follow the Stored Communications Act (18 U.S.C. §§ 2701–2713):

• Basic account records (name, email address, account creation date, sign-in times and IP addresses) require at least a valid subpoena.
• Court orders, including orders under 18 U.S.C. § 2703(d), get account records only, as above. When we receive a subpoena or court order, we also seal the named accounts' content, unread and undisclosed, for 18 months, so it is still available, as it stood that day, if a search warrant follows.
• The contents of posts, replies and private messages require a search warrant issued under the procedures of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure or equivalent state procedures.
• Civil subpoenas in private litigation can't compel us to disclose content. Parties seeking content should obtain it from the users involved.

Preservation requests

On receipt of a preservation request under 18 U.S.C. § 2703(f), we preserve the records identified while you obtain formal process. The law requires 90 days; we hold them for 95 days from the date we receive the request, and for 95 days from the date we receive each renewed request, so a renewal that arrives a few days late still finds everything in place.

Emergency requests

If you believe there is an emergency involving danger of death or serious physical injury, email legal@frendivo.com with "EMERGENCY" in the subject line. Describe the emergency and the information you need, and include a callback number. We may disclose information in good faith under 18 U.S.C. § 2702(b)(8) and (c)(4).

We verify every request

Forged requests sent from compromised police email accounts are a known problem. We confirm each request by calling the issuing agency or court at a publicly listed number before we disclose anything.

How records are delivered

Records come as one AES-256 encrypted .zip file, with a SHA-256 checksum for every file inside and for the zip itself. The password arrives first, in a separate email to the address we verified, and the file follows in another. Both are marked high importance and request a read receipt; please allow it, or reply, so our records show the delivery. Open it with 7-Zip, WinZip or a similar tool; Windows' built-in unzip can't.

Keep the password with your case file. You are the only people who have it. Frendivo keeps no copy and cannot open the file. If the password is lost, we can only prepare the records again as a new package, and only while they still exist.

We tell our users

Our policy is to notify affected users before disclosing their information, unless we are legally prohibited from doing so (for example by a nondisclosure order under 18 U.S.C. § 2705(b)), or unless notice would be futile or would increase a risk of harm in an emergency. If a nondisclosure order expires, we notify the user then.

Child sexual exploitation

We report apparent child sexual exploitation to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) through its CyberTipline, as 18 U.S.C. § 2258A requires, and preserve the related records. Investigators should coordinate with NCMEC and contact us at legal@frendivo.com.

Transparency

We plan to publish a yearly report of how many legal requests we received and how many we complied with.