Some users panicked after it seemed like Snapchat knew when they were born.
It seems, you’re the one who told Snapchat about your date of birth or place of birth. The app’s exact knowledge of a user’s exact time, date, and birth location has been an issue for users on Twitter and TikTok for the past few days. But that’s because of the Snapchat’s Astrological Profile feature, not some nefarious new skill. This feature became popular last year.
You can see your “Astrological Birthdays” in Snapchat’s settings. And if you didn’t know you’d given the app all that information, that would be a pretty alarming find. However, checking baby photos won’t reveal that Snapchat Hot Dog has been with you since birth.
“Astrological Profile feature is the cause”, Snapchat told.
As Snapchat claims. The birth date and time information shown above is actually inputted by the users to get more specific information for the astrological profile feature. This feature requires exact date and time of birth from each person in order to accurately calculate their star chart reading. In addition, Snapchat also states that it takes the privacy of personally identifiable information very seriously. And that this detailed birth date and time information 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 across their stories and check their relative compatibility with friends. You shared your date of birth with Snapchat when you created your profile. The new astrology features just go a step further to ask the time and place of your birth.
One side effect of allowing Snapchat to act as an astrologer is that the app now has full details of your date of birth and place of birth stored in the “Birthday” section of your settings as “My Astrological Birthday.” Snapchat doesn’t share any birth info unless you want to (your date of birth with friends at most). And you can delete that specific birth time and location at any time with a single tap. No individual pieces of information are particularly damaging on their own. But it’s a good illustration of how apps can collect information about you over time, even if it’s never shared or necessarily used by the app.
This confusion may be because Snapchat has so many interesting but easy to forget features.
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