Despite appearances, Snapchat did not discover your birthday or birthplace on its own; you most likely told it to it.
The app’s precise knowledge of a user’s birth time, date, and location has caused some concern among users on Twitter and TikTok in recent days, but this is due to Snapchat’s Astrological Profile feature, not some nefarious new skill the app has acquired as it has soared in popularity over the last year.
You can see your “Astrological Birthday” in Snapchat’s settings area, which may be scary if you weren’t aware you had already given the app all of that information.
However, looking through infant images won’t indicate that the Snapchat Hot Dog has been with you since birth.
Snapchat tells techtalkarena that its Astrological Profile feature is the cause:
The birth date and time information displayed above was provided by users in order to gain more particular information, as part of our new astrological profiles feature.
In order to determine each person’s unique star chart reading, the function requires their exact birth date and time.
Snap values the protection of personally identifying information, and this more detailed birth date and time information is only utilized for the astrological profile function.
In November 2020, Snapchat announced Astrological Profiles, allowing users to post and compare horoscopes on their stories, as well as check their relative compatibility with friends.
When you created a Snapchat profile, you already provided your birthdate; the new astrological features just asked for the time and location of your birth.
Allowing Snapchat to play astrologer has the unintended consequence of storing the complete information of your birthdate and birthplace in the “Birthday” section of settings as “My Astrological Birthday.”
Snapchat doesn’t disclose any birth information unless you specifically ask it to (at most, your birthdate with friends), and you can erase that exact birth time and location information at any time.
None of these bits of information are particularly harmful on their own, but they do serve as an example of how apps can collect information about you over time, even if it’s never intended to be shared or utilized by the app.
This misconception stems from the fact that Snapchat has a number of (obviously amusing) features that are easy to overlook, rather than the fact that it is technically a Cancer, based on when it was first debuted as Picaboo. Otherwise, it’s a total Cancer move.
