click has announced that it temporarily disables Snapchat’s “heat card” feature for Ukraine, which makes it so that the app no longer shows how many photos are taken in certain places. The company says the move is a “precautionary measure” and that there will still be a selected public broadcast of photos sent by Ukrainians.
Usually, Snap Map displays a color code to show how many people are posting public images in an area. In practice, this means that you can get a good idea of where Snapchat users are concentrated. Although this publicly available data doesn’t usually make sense (it’s no surprise that more people write from downtown Seattle than from the nearby National Forest), in a wartime scenario in which Russia may want to track evacuations or movements. citizens, this is probably for the best that the feature is off.
Companies are careful in the region
Other companies have taken similar steps to make the movement of Ukrainians more difficult to track – Google has excluded information on live traffic in Ukraine, as did Apple. Snap also took some additional action after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. According to a news release from the company, it has stopped showing ads in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine and will not sell advertising space to Russian legal entities.