Snapchat Plus: A Red Flag in Disguise

They call it an upgrade, but it’s really just a fancy term to spy on people wrapped in emojis. Snapchat’s premium subscription, Snapchat Plus, was released in mid-2022 as a “just-for-fans” surprise, with personalized icons, unique themes, and early-access features. However, all of this is just a ruse. Underneath, there is a disturbing expansion of privacy invasion and casualized monitoring, which is linked directly to daily interactions. According to ‘The Wessex Wire‘, Snapchat has “made the app even more toxic” for teens by encouraging compulsive behaviours such as watching, monitoring, and repeating situations, which feeds insecurity and anxiety. You can clock exactly when someone is typing, see who is constantly rewatching your Stories, and follow your friends’ movements down to the second. Friendship is not friendship anymore.

The “Ghost Trails” feature makes everything creepier. According to ‘The Tab‘, Snapchat⁺ offers a feature that allows you to use Snap Map to track your “friends” movements over the past 24 hours, including timestamps. The best part is that tracking Snapchat⁺ is completely free. If someone on your buddy list is a subscriber and you’ve activated Snap Map, your movements are fair game. Consent loses significance when it is dependent on the privacy settings of others.

These aren’t merely weird upgrades. They are part of a larger trend that competitors, such as the California Learning Resource Network, have been pointing out for years. Snapchat’s technologies for temporary messaging, location sharing, and augmented reality are creating a space for stalking, data mining, algorithmic manipulation, and mental health problems. Snapchat⁺ profits from this rather than solving the issue.

The app that previously promoted itself as free, here for a moment and gone the next, now swaps that freedom for exposure, which is offered on a monthly basis. It doesn’t simply appeal to “superfans”; it deliberately encourages individuals to monitor one another, to feed on little digital details from someone else’s day. “Streaks,” which were once simply a mark of dedication, are now loaded with features that create anxiety and pettiness.

The Ghost Trails screenshot says it all. A detailed, twisting map of where someone’s been, with each step ready to be studied.

Snapchat Plus is not an innocent upgrade; it actually is a societal push toward normalising digital snooping. It destroys boundaries, rewrites consent expectations, and exploits socially anxious users, particularly teenagers, all in the name of participation. Before you buy into this creepy subscription, consider whether this is a connection or control.