Snapchat is always trying to improve its child safety. The social media application announced it was developing features that would allow parents better access to their children the last October. The company launches a new “Snapchat Family Center” feature that will enable parents and guardians to see who their children have been talking to. Here are the details.
Snapchat officially introduces parental controls
The parental controls update comes Snapchat after other social media apps‘ family permissions, including Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. To use this feature, known as Family Center, parents or guardians have to download the Snapchat app on their device. Then, they can link their account to their children via an opt-in invite process. Both parents and children have to accept the invites to link their accounts.
Parents can report accounts that might be violating Snap’s rules straight from the Family Center. Snapchat said in its Tuesday blog post, “Our goal was to create a set of tools designed to reflect the dynamics of real-world relationships and foster collaboration and trust between parents and teens. The feature is meant to copy real-life relationships, like when a parent lets a kid’s friends come over but doesn’t monitor everything.”
With this explanation, we can understand that the feature lets only see the person your children are talking to. You cannot see the messages and content. You will be able to see the children’s friend list and report potential abuse to Snap’s Trust & Safety team for review. Parents or guardians can access the new controls either from the app’s Profile Settings or by searching for “family center” from the Search tab.
The company is also planning to launch new Snapchat Family Center features over the next few weeks, besides the features allowing parents to see the new friends their children have added including with additional content controls.
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