Snapchat may soon have parental controls called “Family Center.”
Watchful, a market intelligence company, has shared several screenshots that look like Snapchat’s family centre. Screenshots indicate that parents of teens will be able to see who they are friends with, who they have been texting in the last seven days, and feel comfortable reporting abuse on the platform.
Parents can invite their teens to the Family Center in the app to begin monitoring. Teens can accept or reject invitations.
The Parental Control feature was first introduced in October 2021 by Evan Spiegel, CEO of the platform. He mentioned that this feature will enable parents to see how their children use the platform. Moreover, he hopes that this feature will help the players to be 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 per cent encountered nudity or sexual content online.
Not only that, 93.31 per cent of people were found to have conversations about alcohol and drugs.
Better late than never?
In March this year, the 44th Attorney General signed a letter outlining the Platform and TickTock parental control features. He mentioned a number of issues in social media apps, such as their negative impact on the physical, emotional and mental health of children and adolescents.
Furthermore, he noted that material depicting abusive sex could harm a child’s view of a healthy relationship that could perpetuate domestic abuse and human trafficking. The letter also emphasized that Snapchat and TickTock do not collaborate with third-parent control apps to allow parents to monitor and restrict what their children can do on the platform.
While Snapchat has not commented on these latest leaks, it is likely to be out soon. Despite its competition, Tiktok and Instagram are the biggest, Snapchat is one of the best apps on iOS for sharing images and short videos. No launch date has yet been announced for Snapchat’s new parental control features.