Snapchat knows when you were born if you used it to check your horoscope

Despite the appearance of things, Snapchat hasn’t learned your birthday or place of birth on its own – you’ve probably said it yourself. The exact knowledge of the application of the exact time, date and location of a user’s birth has been of concern to users on Twitter and TikTok over the past few days, but that’s due to Snapchat’s Astrological Profile feature and not a nefarious new skill the app has learned as it has grown in popularity over the past year or so.

You can display your “Astrological Birthday” in Snapchat’s settings section, and if you didn’t know that you had already given the app all of this information, that would be a pretty alarming find. However, checking baby photos will not reveal that the Snapchat Hot Dog has been with you from birth.

Picture: hegotbanks

Snapchat tells The edge that his characteristic astrological profile is the cause:

The date and time of birth shown above was actually entered by the users themselves in order to get more specific information from our latest Astrology Profiles feature. The feature requires each person’s exact date and time of birth in order to calculate their exact star map reading.

We take the privacy of personally identifiable information at Snap very seriously, and this more detailed information about date and time of birth is only used for this astrological profile feature.

Snapchat launched Astrological Profiles in November 2020 as a way for users to share and compare horoscopes on their stories and check their relative compatibility with their friends. You have already shared your birthday with Snapchat when you created a profile; the new astrological features have gone one step further to ask for the time and place of your birth.

A side effect of letting Snapchat play the astrologer is that the app now has all of your birthday and birthplace details stored in the “Birthday” section of settings like “My Astrological Birthday”. Snapchat doesn’t share any birth information unless you want to (at most, that would be your birthday with friends), and you can remove that birth time and location info at any time with a simple tap. None of this individual information is particularly damaging on its own, but it’s a good illustration of how apps can collect information about you over time, even though it’s never meant to be shared or necessarily used. by the application.

Chalk that confusion over to Snapchat having a lot of (admittedly fun) features that are easy to overlook, and not the fact that, technically, based on the initial launch of Snapchat as Picaboo, it’s a Cancer. It is a total movement of Cancer otherwise.