How to use Snapchat without sharing your location

Snapchat's new Snap Map feature is incredibly creepy — it shares your location with all your friends every time you open Snapchat — and might make you consider blocking Snapchat from seeing your location altogether. This affects some Snapchat features, so let's take a look at what you're losing.

The features you lose Of course, if you turn off location permissions, the Snap Map feature won't work. If you try to use it, you will be prompted to enable location services.

The basic filters are also unusable without space, which is a bit odd. It's understandable that location-based filters and anything that used location data—like altitude or temperature filters—wouldn't work, but there's no reason the color filter wouldn't. Snapchat should be used with caution. Otherwise, the chances of getting Snapchat hacked are high.

You also won't be able to use Snapchat's “Add Nearby Users” feature. However, this is hardly a dealbreaker, as there are other ways to add friends in Snapchat.

Finally, you can't post any snaps to shared stories that are location-based. If your city has a shared story for an event, you cannot contribute.

Other than these few features, Snapchat will continue to operate as normal. Strangely, Lenses that make Snapchat so popular are still there, even though the more boring filters have been removed.

How to Remove Snapchat Location Permissions

To ensure that Snapchat has absolutely no access to your phone's location, we will block it from using it at the system level by changing its app permissions. We have complete guides to managing app permissions on iOS and on Android, but I'll give a brief overview here.

RELATED: How to Manage App Permissions on Your iPhone or iPad

On an iPhone or iPad If you're using an iOS device, go to Settings and scroll down until you get to Snapchat.

Now Snapchat can't use your location.
On an Android phone or tabletop Android, go to Settings > Apps and select Snapchat from the list.

Select Permissions and turn off “Location”.

You may get a message that says, “The app was designed for an older version of Android,” especially if you haven't updated Snapchat in a while. Tap Deny anyway. Snapchat should still work fine, but if it doesn't, you need to re-enable location services.