Snap Inc. is launching new tools in several countries allowing parents to keep an eye on what their offspring are doing on Snapchat.
Parents worried about their teens’ Snapchat activities can take a breather. Snap Inc., the parent company of Snapchat, has just launched a new parental control tool within its application. Family Center, that’s its name, allows parents or referring adults aged 25 or over to keep an eye on the dating of their children on the platform. To create its tool, Snapchat worked with families so that its tool offers interactions that are as close as possible to those that parents can have with their children in real life.
Parental controls that respect teen privacy
They can thus access the list of friends of their teenagers and find out with whom they have exchanged messages. Snapchat, however, wants to protect the privacy of teens since parents using the Family Center will not be able to access messages sent and received by their children, nor view the snaps that their offspring exchanges with their friends. However, parents will be able to confidentially confidentialize accounts they consider to be of concern.
“Family Center is designed to mirror the way parents interact with their teens in the real world, where parents typically know who their teens are friends with and when they’re hanging out — but don’t listen to their private conversations. “indicates the parent company of Snapchat on its site.
According to Bloomberg, the Family Center is currently only deployed in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Snap Inc is planning to roll it out to the rest of the world starting next fall, possibly with new features. Teenagers may soon be able to alert their parents when they report an account to Snapchat. To set up the Family Center, parents must have a Snapchat account and be friends with their offspring in order to invite their child to join the tool.
The platform has stepped up efforts over the past few months to try to make its youngest users as secure as possible. The social network has, for example, set up a system requiring the youngest to be mutually friends to start chatting together. Separately, Snapchat has made the friend lists of its youngest users private and by default prohibits them from having a public account on the platform. The app has also built in additional safeguards to prevent strangers from finding and connecting with teens.
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Snap Inc.