Now, Snapchat will allow parents to know who their kids chat with on the app – Times of India

Snapchat has launched Family Center, a new feature aimed at improving supervision of parents over their children’s activities in the app. It will allow parents and guardians to know who their kids/wards are chatting with in the app, without disclosing the contents of the chat to them. Also, the Family Center invite has to be accepted by both the kid and the parent/guardian for the feature to be enabled for them. After both have accepted the invite, the parent/guardian can see who their kid/ward has interacted with on the platform over the last seven days.
In case the parents think an account should be looked into, they can report such accounts to Snap’s Trust and Safety Team. The feature also includes tools that let the parents know who is new to their kids’ friend list and with the power of some extra content controls. The company will roll out the feature over the coming few weeks.
“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,” Snap said in its blog post.
When it comes to teen safety on the platform, Snap had introduced two features to address the same in January this year. One of these features was added to friend suggestion feature Quick Add to make the platform safer for 13 to 17 year olds. The feature blocks showing the friend suggestions of users in the age of 13-17 to others, unless they have a set of mutual friends.
“In order to be discoverable in Quick Add by someone else, users under 18 will need to have a certain number of friends in common with that person — further ensuring it is a friend they know in real life,” said Snapchat.
Also, when it comes to the issue of drugs, the company has faced severe criticism over the years on account of various teenagers losing their lives after purchasing drugs on the online platform. The platform said that it made some progress with its drug-detecting algorithms, with the current upgrade to its machine learning and AI algorithm claimed to give a 33% increase in detection since the last update. The company also has two new partners to the Heads Up portal – Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America (CADCA), and Truth Initiative.