The Price of Privacy: Features on Snapchat Plus are an invasion of privacy and not additions to be bought

Whether it’s features like customizing chat backgrounds or viewing the number of rewatches your story got, Snapchat+ is an unnecessary addition to Snapchat. Social media is already an aspect of our lives that limits privacy, and Snapchat Plus only enhances that in concerningly creepy ways whether you purchase it or not. So for the price of $3.99 per month or $29.99 annually, Snapchat Plus is supposed to be an upgrade enhancing the app but is really just purchasing our privacy.

And yes, there are many harmless aspects of the update that came out on June 2022, between the cute backgrounds behind chats with friends or custom app icons, but it gets strange when you can see someone else’s best friends list, your story rewatch count and use “story boost” to place your Snapchat story at the front of a friend’s page.

The seeing-someone-else’s-best-friends-list feature, Solar System, allows you to see where you’re ranked on someone’s list in the form of the solar system. Your friend is the sun, and your spot on their list is determined by which planet you are — the distance from the sun. I don’t want anyone I have added on Snapchat to be able to see if I’m closest with them or have “better Snapchat friends” for the cost of $3.99 a month.

The way it’s set up is silly. So they will tell you what number you are on someone’s best friend list but you have to look up where Jupiter is in comparison to the sun. They act like this makes it hard to figure out where you’re ranked on their list, but just adds a step to ultimately still find out where you are.

I would prefer it just straight up saying where you are or not including that at all.

TikTok has put a similar update in place, but the difference is that when you turn on features like profile views, you can only see people who also have the feature turned on — making it a mutual decision.

This brings me to SnapMap. Yes, when you turn off Ghost Mode you are agreeing to sharing your location with friends, but people with the update can see everywhere you have been in the past 24 hours with the feature called “Ghost Trails.” This is straight up weird and scary. I’ll have to pass.

Snapchat Plus is an invasion of privacy and a waste of money.