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AI is fun, interesting, impressive, and oh-so-scary! Snapchat released its AI chatbot to the public, and people are cracking into it. However, it seems that My AI can access your location even if you’re not sharing your location with the app.
Now, this is still a developing story, so expect to see more on it in the future. My AI is Snapchat’s AI chatbot that’s powered by ChatGPT. With it, the user has a ton of AI power at their fingertips. While it’s powered by ChatGPT, there are some differences in its functionality.
My AI might know your location even if you’re not sharing it with Snapchat
We’re all familiar with the threat of social media platforms having access to our locations on a constant basis. This is why many of us choose not to share our location with these apps. It’s easy to disable location tracking, and, in Snapchat’s case, you can still use the app’s core capabilities without sharing your location.
Now, let’s talk about My AI. Reports are popping up around the internet that this chatbot is able to pinpoint a person’s location. Now, this wouldn’t be a huge deal if the person was sharing their location with Snapchat. However, numerous people are saying that it was able to give them location-based information even with their location isn’t being shared with the app.
I’ve been able to replicate this but I couldn’t at first. The thing is that when I downloaded Snapchat, I never shared my location with the app. So, when I first asked My AI something like “Where’s the nearest Burger King”, it couldn’t deliver any results.
I tried multiple times. However, I enabled the location permission for a few seconds, went to the Snap Map for a second, disabled the location permission, then went to My AI. I asked it about a nearby location, and it was able to pull results. My location permission was disabled at this point.
So, if you’ve shared your location with Snapchat at any point, My AI is able to pull from that data. This could mean that, while you’re not currently sharing your information with Snapchat, your location is still stored on the company’s servers. We’ll have to wait and see if the company is going to respond to this.