Snapchat may have parental controls coming soon in the form of what appears to be called the "Family Center."
Watchful, a market intelligence company, shared several screenshots of what looks like Snapchat's Family Center. The screenshots indicate that the parent of teens will be able to see who they are friends with, whom they have messaged in the last seven days, and feel comfortable reporting abuse to the platform.
Parents can invite their teens to the in-app Family Center to start the monitoring. Teens can accept or decline the invitation.
The parental control feature was first teased by the platform's CEO, Evan Spiegel, in October 2021. He mentioned that the feature will enable parents to see how their children are using the platform. Furthermore, he's hopeful that the feature will help players in getting more comfortable as their parents are there to guide them.
A study done by Bark showed that there were 3.4 billion messages in 2021 across 30 apps and 74/6 percent of teens were involved in a self-harm/suicidal situation, while 90.73 percent encountered nudity or sexual content online.
Not only that, but it also found that 93.31 percent had conversations about alcohol and drugs.
Better Late Than Never?
Is Snapchat already a bit late to the parental control feature? Other social platforms, such as Facebook and Instagram, already have parental control features in place.
In March this year, 44 attorneys general signed a letter that urges the platform and TikTok to have parental control features. They cited a range of problems they had with social media apps, such as their negative impact on the physical, emotional, and mental well-being of children and teens.
Furthermore, they also noted that content that depicts abusive sexual relationships can harm a child's view of a healthy relationship that can perpetuate domestic abuse and human trafficking.
The letter also emphasized that Snapchat and TikTok don't collaborate with third-parental control apps to let parents monitor and restrict their kids on what they can do on the platforms.
TikTok was the first to adopt a parental control feature when it released its in-app Family Pairing Tool in 2020 and continued to develop it to enhance the parental control feature.
It allows parents to pair their TikTok account with a child's to control the account's privacy, whether it's suggested to other users on the platform, whether the child can use search and who can view, comment, or interact with the child's content.
Although Snapchat hasn't commented on these latest leaks, there is a huge possibility that it'll be rolling out anytime soon.
Despite its competition, the biggest being TikTok and Instagram, Snapchat remains to be one of the best apps on the iOS for sharing images and short videos. No launch date has been released yet for Snapchat's new parental control features.
This article is owned by Tech Times
Written by April Fowell
