Snapchat: Screenshots of You
What was once an app used solely for sending disappearing photos, is now a highly profitable advertiser. Go to Snapchat’s “explore page” and suddenly you’re in front of a virtual magazine stand. Sure, your friend’s Snapstories are there, but below those, there’s a whole library of advertised content to consume. Even if you don’t read Cosmopolitan’s weekly horoscope, your experience of viewing Snapstories will quickly be disrupted with advertisements, in between swiping on friends.
One day, while I was in the depths of boredom, I decided to look at Snapchat settings, like, all of them — that’s how bored I was (does anyone else do this??)! That’s when I discovered that Snapchat tracks more than just my location, and who I frequently send photos to: they’re tracking my interests.
Within settings, there is a tab titled, ‘Manage’ and that’s where your ‘Lifestyle & Interests’ lie.
I was baffled upon discovering this. All these tabs, that I never even knew existed, were checked for me; some interests were accurate and others were completely wrong.
The most interesting element of all was definitely the Content Interest Tags, where, according to the app, “Snapchat Content Interest Tags are used to personalize Snapchat content, like the Stories that appear in your Discover Feed.”
I’m super intrigued by this lifestyle tracking, because I have no idea how long it has been going on for, especially since I don’t use the Discover Feed as often as I once did.
A little freaked out, and also a bit curious, I turned off all my “interests” and deleted all of my Content Interest Tags. According to rule 13 in Gelernter’s Manifesto, “any well-designed next-generation electronic gadget will come with a `Disable Omniscience’ button.” Given this declaration, I’m eager to see if Snapchat will stop tracking my interests, or if those toggles will switch back on, and more tags will be added back.
At the end of the day, it should be no surprise that Snapchat is keeping such tabs on us. After all, everyone who uses the app has agreed to the Terms and Conditions despite never having read a single word.
Whether or not such tab keeping is ethical is an entirely different story, and it opens a large can of worms. The purpose of Snapchat has shifted from allowing users to send photos, to the ability (and need) to collect data on those users, in order for the app to stay alive and make money. In Information Transparency, Floridi says, “semantic information is not the result of a ‘snapshot’ or passive observation, but depends on agents’ proactive meaningful data elaborations (semanticisation).” So, maybe this hidden tab of “interests” Snapchat keeps on us isn’t all that eerie, after all, the app is meant to take snapshots of ourselves.
