Snap has announced that it will temporarily disable Snapchat’s « heatmap » feature in Ukraine, causing the app to no longer indicate how many snaps are being taken in specific places. According to the corporation, the decision is a « safety measure, » and there will still be a selected public feed of photographs provided by Ukrainians.
Normally, the Snap Map shows a color code to indicate the number of users who have posted public photographs in a given location. In practice, this means you can get a clear sense of where the majority of Snapchat users are concentrated. While this publicly available data isn’t normally useful (it’s no surprise that more individuals are posting from downtown Seattle than the neighboring national forest), in a conflict scenario where Russia may want to follow evacuations or citizen movements, it’s definitely preferable to disable the option.
Other firms have taken similar steps to make Ukrainians’ activities more difficult to detect – Google disabled live traffic data in Ukraine, as did Apple. Snap has also taken a few further steps in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. According to a corporate news post, it has ceased broadcasting ads in Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine, and will not sell ad slots to Russian entities.
