How Snapchat knows where and what time you were born – and why it’s nothing sinister

Snapchat users have been taking to social media in recent days to highlight a seemingly creepy feature.

According to many complaints on Twitter, the photo messaging app “suddenly” appears to know exactly where they were born – and what time.

The information displays under “My Astrological Birthday” when people check their date of birth in the app’s settings.

With screengrabs spreading across social media, outraged users have branded the precision of the details “weird” and “really creepy”, as well as questioning how the app found them.

What is the Astrological Birthday feature?

However, despite the sudden outpouring of consternation, it appears to be extremely unlikely that Snapchat has suddenly unearthed the details of your birth.

Instead, it seems that the information that displays under on the settings page was inputted by users themselves, but long enough ago that they have forgotten doing so – hence the sudden shock.

An update released by Snapchat in mid-November last year introduced a series of new features connected to astrology, including “astrological compatibility” and the “astrological profile”.

It gave users the chance to generate a 12-page horoscope from the app, by clicking the purple zodiac symbol which appeared underneath users’ names after tapping their profile icon.

In order to access this, however, you had to input your birthday and, crucially, your time and place of birth on Snapchat.

This information was then made visible under the birthday subsection of the app’s settings, giving users the opportunity to make any changes if they had entered their details incorrectly (when a user enters their birth time, it automatically defaults to the current time).

However, if a new user hasn’t entered the information by tapping their purple zodiac sign, the information doesn’t display.

It appears that they will only see if they want to change their date of birth (if they provided it when setting up an account), or activate the “Birthday Party” feature.

So, while many of the tweets insist that the app’s access to their personal data is the result of a new update, there is no indication that this is the case.

Snapchat confirmed to i that the only way the Astrological Birthday would show with a specific time was if a user had manually entered it, and that it has always been displayed in the same way.

It appears that users might simply be checking the “birthday” section of the settings for the first time (after seeing screengrabs spreading around social media) and have forgotten that they wanted to check their horoscope the best part of nine months ago.