Snap says its bot won’t instantly notice you’ve stopped sharing your location

Today, Snapchat explained that its My AI bot might take a while to notice if you stop giving your location information to the app. This means that the bot retains location details for a period of time before realizing that a user has stopped sharing that information.

After Snapchat rolled out its AI-powered chatbot, My AI, to everyone last week, there were a ton of complaints about what it knows, especially a user’s location. The backlash after the chatbot’s wider availability led to several people leaving 1-star reviews for Snapchat.

The company said My AI knows all the information you share with Snapchat, including location. Additionally, it displays a notice at the start of the chat stating that the app will share information with the chatbot for personalized suggestions. However, Snap said the GPT-powered bot doesn’t know any additional details about you.

“It is important to know that My AI does not collect any new location information from Snapchatters. As detailed in our support pagethe chatbot only has access to a Snapchatter’s location if they have previously granted permissions to Snapchat (which also allows their location to be shared on Snap Map),” Snap said in a blog post.

The social enterprise explained that the bot uses location data to give you personalized recommendations on things like restaurants around you.

He clarified on the My AI support page that the app only shares “city-level location and very generalized distances between you and places” for suggestions.

If you don’t want to give your location to Snapchat, you can easily disable this permission by setting it on both iOS and Android. Snap says turning off location data means the bot won’t be able to give personalized recommendations based on your location.