Evan Spiegel, CEO of Snapchat, recently precise the potential arrival of a parental control feature on its platform. baptized “Family Centre”this should allow parents to follow their child’s activity on the application.
Soon a parental control on Snapchat?
With this new feature, parents whose kids are on Snapchat will be able to see who their teen is friends with on the app, who they’ve messaged in the past seven days, and more. According to Evan Spiegel, this new function should make it possible to give more visibility to parents on how their kids or teens are using the platform and, it would definitely make them more comfortable with the idea of them using the app.
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Snapchat is latest app to meet the need to create parental control tools, although its application is widely used by very young users. TikTok and YouTube did the same a few months ago. According to the company’s CEO, the Snapchat community is made up of more than 75% by 13-34 year olds, distributed in more than 20 countries. The future “Family Centre” of Snapchat will be very useful for parents because, unlike many social networks, Snapchat’s friend lists are not public.
A “collaborative” approach to respecting the privacy of children
While parents will be able to see who their child has chatted with in the past seven days, they will not be able to access the content of conversations. If necessary, they can help their teen report abuse or harassment. Parents can invite their child to join the parental control program but they won’t have the last word. The recipient of this invitation has the option to accept or decline the invitation. An approach that also aims to respect the privacy of the youngest.
The idea is therefore not to allow parents to spy on their teenagers, but rather to set common rules on the use of the application. At the moment the feature is still under development. At this stage, products change regularly before they are launched to the general public. It means that the final product could be very different from the one unveiled by Snapchat:
Picture: Snapchat