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

After receiving numerous 1-star evaluations over its My AI chatbot function, Snapchat at the moment revealed a blog post to clarify in additional element how location sharing impacts its in-app AI expertise. The corporate moreover famous that the My AI chatbot would possibly take “a little bit time” to note that you simply’ve stopped offering your location info to the app. That might imply the bot retains your location particulars for some time, giving it the looks of getting access to information you had restricted.

After Snapchat rolled out its AI-powered chatbot My AI to all world customers final week, there have been quite a few complaints concerning the function associated each to the place it’s positioned within the app and what it is aware of — together with a consumer’s location.

The corporate mentioned that My AI can have entry to some info that you simply share with Snapchat, like your location. It additionally has information of the consumer’s age, as previously announced, because of the elevated protections it carried out for youthful customers. As well as, the company earlier this month shared that messages with My AI are retained within the app, except the consumer deletes them.

When launching My AI, a discover at the beginning of the chat informs the consumer the app will share some info with the chatbot for custom-made options.

“It’s necessary to know that My AI doesn’t acquire any new location info from Snapchatters,” Snap mentioned in a blog post.. “As detailed in our support page, the chatbot solely has entry to a Snapchatter’s location in the event that they’ve already granted permissions to Snapchat (which additionally makes it doable to share their location on Snap Map).”

Snap defined the bot makes use of the situation knowledge to provide you customized suggestions about numerous issues — like eating places round you. And it specified on the My AI support page that the app solely shares “city-level location and really generalized distances between you and locations” for options.

By default, Snapchat doesn’t allow location sharing. However that permission is enabled if you happen to use Snap Map — as 300 million Snapchatters now do.

Should you later change your thoughts and now not wish to give Snapchat your location, you may flip off that permission from Settings on iOS and Android units. Snap says that turning off location knowledge signifies that the AI chatbot received’t be capable of present suggestions which can be customized based mostly in your location.

Nevertheless, it famous within the weblog put up that “if Snapchatters cease sharing their location with Snapchat, it might take some time for this to take impact in My AI.”

This might probably confuse some customers as it might appear as if the AI had information of your location, even when the permission had been turned off.

Nonetheless, this wasn’t the one grievance customers had concerning the My AI function, resulting in its 1-star evaluations. Many individuals had been additionally upset that the AI was pinned to the highest of the Chats tab and couldn’t be blocked or eliminated. Solely Snapchat+ subscribers have that capacity, making folks really feel as in the event that they had been being pressured to pay to take away a function they didn’t need.

4/26/23, 5 PM ET: up to date with further reporting by Sarah Perez