Avoid Snapchat’s Astrology Feature If You Want To Keep Your Birthday A Secret

Some Snapchat users have recently discovered that the app knows their exact birthday, and while that might seem dubious at first, it’s simply the result of Snapchat’s Astrology feature. Online security is top of mind for many people right now, especially when it comes to social media sites. Facebook is notorious for mishandling people’s information, Twitter has had its fair share of hacks, and so on. These apps are used by millions of people every day. If they can’t protect the endless amount of data being fed to them by the second, that’s cause for concern.

Like any social media app, Snapchat has had its fair share of privacy concerns over the years. Some users complain about random people adding them as friends, there’s confusion about whether or not Snaps are really gone once they’re deleted, and features like the Snap Map – which shows an exact user’s location in real-time on a map — have raised the eyebrows of many people. Snapchat is no safer or more dangerous to use than any of its competition, meaning common sense should always be used when interacting with it (or anything else online).

In this latest debacle, people are trying to figure out how Snapchat knows all of their birth information — including the year, month, day, time, and location they were born. That might sound the alarm bells for some folks, but Snapchat hasn’t collected any data behind its users’ backs. Speaking to The Verge, a Snapchat spokesperson says, “The birth date and time information was actually inputted by the users themselves in order to obtain more specific information, stemming from our latest astrological profiles feature.”

How The Snapchat Astrology Feature Works

Those astrological profiles first came to Snapchat in November 2020 as part of the Snapchat Astrology feature. After someone enters the date, time, and location for their birth, Snapchat uses its “divine astrological sources” to reveal people’s personality traits, qualities, and astrological compatibility with their other Snapchat friends. Snapchat users likely enter this information without thinking about it at the time, a few weeks or months pass by, and then they’re trying to figure out why such personal info is in their app.

It’s advisable to think twice before handing over this kind of data to any social app. For someone that does, however, Snapchat promises it’s kept safe. Per a company spokesperson, “We take the privacy of personally identifiable information very seriously at Snap, and this more granular birth date and time information is used only for this astrological profile feature.” The Astrology feature is neat for folks interested in that sort of thing.  Just ask yourself if it’s worth telling a multi-billion-dollar company when and where you were born before doing so.

Source: The Verge, Snapchat

About The Author

Joe Maring
(1523 Articles Published)

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Joe has been actively writing and talking about consumer tech since 2012. His biggest passion lies with smartphones, but he’s happy to talk your ear off about just about anything with a CPU. He lives in Kalamazoo, MI with his wife, two cats, and pit bull/boxer mix.

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