Snapchat has announced that it’s momentarily turning off snap chat heat map attribute for Ukraine making it so the app no longer shows how many snaps are being taken in particular locations. The agency says that move is a safety measure and that there will still be a curetted public feed of snaps submitted by Ukrainians.
Normally the snap map exhibits a color code to show how people are posting public images in an area. In practice, that means you can get a good idea of where snap chat users are determined. While this publicly obtainable data isn’t usually mean it’s not a surprise that more people are posting from downtown Seattle than the nearby national forest in a wartime scenario where Russia may want to track evacuations or citizen movements, it’s almost certainly for the best that the attribute is turned off.
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Other agencies have taken comparable actions to make Ukrainian movements harder to track Google turned off live traffic information in Ukraine as did Apple. Snap has also taken a few supplementary actions following the Russian attack of Ukraine. According to a report post from the agency, it’s stopped showing ads in Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine and won’t sell ad spots to Russian entities.
