How to Change Your Birthday on Snapchat: An In-Depth Walkthrough for 2024
Since bursting onto the social media scene in 2011, Snapchat has cemented itself as a favorite way for friends to exchange fun, ephemeral photos and videos that disappear after being viewed. One of Snapchat‘s signature features reminds your contacts when it‘s your birthday by displaying a cake emoji next to your username. But what if you signed up with the wrong birth date or want to change it for other reasons? Thankfully, updating your birthday in Snapchat only takes a moment.
This definitive guide for 2024 will walk through exactly how to change your birthday on Snapchat step-by-step, explain key details around Snapchat‘s birthday policy, provide troubleshooting advice for common issues, and share tips for managing your privacy. Let‘s dive in!
Why Over 319 Million Users Might Want to Change Their Birthday
With over 319 million daily active users as of Q3 2022, Snapchat is one of the most popular social networks globally, especially with younger demographics. For context, approximately 90% of Snapchat‘s users are between the ages of 13 and 24.
There are a few key reasons why Snapchatters might want to update the birthday listed on their profile:
1. Entered the Wrong Birth Date Initially
When you rush through signing up for a new app, it‘s easy to accidentally tap the wrong date in your birthday field. As of 2020, roughly 35-40% of people have entered incorrect data at some point when creating online accounts according to SecureAuth. With Snapchat being a top app choice especially for 13-24 year olds setting up new profiles, it‘s reasonable to estimate that a substantial subset likely entered unintended birthdates when registering swiftly on mobile.
2. Prefer a Different Age Displayed Publicly
Some users choose to tweak their birthday displayed on social media profiles to appear older or younger for personal reasons. For example, an 18-year old freshman starting college may want their profile to indicate 21+ to seem open to more social opportunities. Alternatively, users over 18 may adjust their date of birth down a few years if they are pursuing acting, modeling, or other industries where youth is emphasized.
3. Turn Off Birthday Notifications
Part of the fun of Snapchat is having a cake emoji appear beside your username on your special day annually, letting friends know to celebrate with you via snaps. However, not everyone wants their exact birthday broadcasted, so changing the date by even just a day prevents Snapchat from displaying the notification icon.
4. Created Account Before Turning 13
Snapchat‘s terms require users to be at least 13 years old. While the app doesn‘t extensively verify ages during sign-up, users who created accounts before turning 13 may want to update their profiles to avoid getting locked out. Once a birthday is set over 13, Snapchat allows continued use.
So whether you accidentally typed the wrong date when rushing to install Snapchat, want your profile age adjusted for personal reasons, wish to avoid the notifications, or created your account too young, updating your birthday through the app is easy.
How Snapchat‘s Backend Handles Birthday Data
To understand how changing your birthday works behind the scenes, it helps to know how Snapchat stores and manages users‘ dates of birth.
When you first create your Snapchat account and enter your birthday, that data gets saved to Snapchat‘s back end databases in their server infrastructure, most likely stored either in SQL databases or NoSQL databases like MongoDB. Their systems apply encryption to protect sensitive user information like birthdays as required by privacy laws like GDPR and CCPA.
As a social media platform with hundreds of millions of users, Snapchat has implemented robust backend architecture to securely store huge volumes of data like dates of birth while enabling low-latency retrieval when displaying profiles. Their backend stack likely leverages technologies like Kubernetes container orchestration for horizontal scaling.
According to Snapchat‘s privacy policy, once you submit your birthday during sign-up, the app shares that data with certain third parties like analytics services, advertising partners, and affiliated platforms like Bitmoji. However, Snapchat states they require vendors to adhere to strict confidentiality standards for handling user data.
When you elect to change your birthday within Snapchat‘s app interface, their client app transmits an API request to update your stored date of birth in their backend user profile databases. Rate limiting restrictions may be implemented on the server side to govern how frequently birthday changes can occur as part of Snapchat‘s business logic governing appropriate use.
So in summary, Snapchat‘s robust infrastructure securely manages billions of data points like birthdays using encrypted databases, with thoughtful controls in place like rate limits on how often dates can be changed.
Why the Number of Birthday Changes Is Restricted
As highlighted above, Snapchat limits how many times users can change their birthday on their profile. Once you attempt to update your birthday past the threshold allowed times, you‘ll see an error like:
You‘ve updated your birthday too many times.
But why does Snapchat restrict users from changing their birthdays indefinitely? A few reasons likely factored into this product decision:
- Prevent abuse from users trying to constantly change ages displayed
- Reduce illegal use from under 13 users attempting to show false older ages
- Establish consistent user identity, especially for advertising purposes
- Limit engineering complexity of limitless profile changes
Research suggests typical rate limits allow anywhere from 3-5 birthday changes per account lifetime. While I wasn‘t able to uncover Snapchat‘s exact threshold, once you pass the allotted modifications, your ability to revise your date of birth becomes permanently blocked.
Some report receiving warnings when nearing the change limit, like “You only have one birthday change left.” So if you do receive alerts about remaining revisions, heed the warnings and verify your next entry is correct!
Snapchat Birthday Policies Compared to Other Social Networks
How does Snapchat compare to other top social platforms when it comes to changing your birthday? Reviewing their policies provides helpful context.
| Platform | # of Birthday Changes Allowed |
|---|---|
| < 5 changes allowed per account | |
| Exact # unclear, but modifications restricted | |
| Snapchat | Estimated 3-5 changes allowed |
| Unlimited changes allowed |
As shown in the table above, Snapchat fits right in line with the industry standard practices for limiting birthday changes established by social media pioneers like Facebook.
Platforms restrict modifications to better establish reliable user identity and prevent misuse. Twitter remains an outlier enabling endless tweaks, which likely contributes to rampant fake accounts and bot abuse the network contends with.
So overall, Snapchat births fall well within typical conventions for balancing user experience customization with preventing misconduct, especially given the large youth user base‘s propensity for minor age misrepresentations.
Step-by-Step Instructions to Change Snapchat Birthdays
Without further ado, let‘s walk through the quick process to change your birth date displayed on your Snapchat account:
1. Open Profile Screen
Tap your Bitmoji or profile picture in the top left of your Snapchat screen to access your profile.
2. Tap Settings Gear Icon
From your profile, select the gear icon in the top right corner to enter your account settings.
3. Scroll Down and Tap “My Account”
In settings, scroll down to the “My Account” section near the bottom and tap to expand it.
4. Select “Birthday”
Within the expanded My Account section, tap on “Birthday” to revise your DOB.
5. Enter Updated Birthday
This brings up a date selector wheel to change your birthday field. Adjust the month, day and year as needed to your new accurate date of birth, then tap “OK” to confirm the changes.
And voila, you’ve successfully updated your birthday! Snapchat will automatically save your refreshed date of birth.
Make sure to triple check your entry is correct before saving changes, since the number of revisions allowed is restricted.
Troubleshooting Tips for Common Birthday Issues
However, you may encounter some errors or troubles in the process. Here are troubleshooting tips for common birthday change issues:
| Issue | Fix |
|---|---|
| Typo’d new birthday | Carefully re-enter correct date while you still have change attempts remaining |
| Already hit change limit | Unfortunately, no user-side fixes exist to reset or increase the modification limit |
| Locked out of account after change | Contact Snapchat Support to review your account and birthday history for restore access |
| Changed birthday won’t save | Try force quitting app, restarting device, reinstalling app |
| Displayed age seems wrong | Double check account hasn’t been compromised; scan device for malware |
If you continue having trouble changing your birthday after trying the above fixes, you‘ll need to reach out to Snapchat Support through their Contact Us page. When describing your issue, be sure to include:
- Your username
- What troubleshooting steps you tried
- Screenshots of any error messages received
With details like these, their team can best troubleshoot next steps tailored to your specific blocker.
Securing Your Privacy on Snapchat
In tandem with changing your birthday for privacy reasons, here are 3 quick tips to better protect personal details within Snapchat:
Adjust visibility controls like who can view your story or location by tapping the settings gear icon > Privacy Controls.
Be selective adding new friends & followers to limit exposure of your snaps, stories, profile and location data.
Review all connected apps & services with potential access to your data under settings > Connected Apps.
Regularly checking Snapchat‘s robust privacy, security and account settings gives you greater control over protecting personal information being shared through the app.
What‘s New with Snapchat Features
Snapchat continually rolls out fresh features beyond just sending disappearing photo and video snaps. Here is a sampling of recent additions as of 2023:
- Dual Camera to capture content from phone cameras simultaneously
- Screenshot notifications when recipients take screenshots of view-once messages
- Director Mode for more control editing your stories
- Snapchat+ paid subscription with exclusive features like choosing who can reach you
- Shared Stories to allow friends to contribute to group stories
- Augmented reality try-on experiences for digital clothing or makeup
So updating your birthday not only lets you access astrology charms aligned to your birth date, but also all Snapchat‘s latest innovations right when they debut.
The platform stays committed to evolving the diverse ways over 319 million users visually communicate today.
Key Takeaways
Changing your birthday on Snapchat only takes a few quick taps once you know the steps:
- Tap your profile picture
- Select the settings gear icon
- Go to “My Account”
- Tap “Birthday”
- Adjust your date details
- Verify correctness then save!
Remember that Snapchat restricts the number of total changes allowed, so double check your entry is accurate before confirming changes.
Common reasons to update your birthday include fixing initially typo’d dates, adjusting ages displayed, turning off birthday notifications, or updating accounts created before age 13.
Snapchat stores birthday data in encrypted databases, with thoughtful infrastructure like rate limiting protecting from abuse of profile changes. Compared to platforms like Instagram and Facebook, Snapchat fits industry standards for permitting a reasonable number of modifications.
Overall, with this comprehensive walkthrough, learning how to update your birthday in Snapchat is easier than ever. So dial in the perfect date for all your 2023 snaps!
