Snap says its bot won’t notice instantly that you 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. That means that the bot retains the location details for a while before understanding that a user has stopped sharing that info.

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

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

“It’s important to know that My AI does not collect any new location information from Snapchatters. As detailed in our support page, the chatbot only has access to a Snapchatter’s location if they’ve already granted permissions to Snapchat (which also makes it possible to share their location on Snap Map),” Snap said in a blog post.

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

It specified 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 Snapchat your location, you can easily turn off that permission from settings both on iOS and Android. Snap says that turning off location data means that the bot won’t be able to give recommendations that are personalized based on your location.