Snapchat’s upcoming family centre feature will allow parents to see who is chatting with their teenage children

• Snapchat is working on a parental controls feature that will allow better monitoring to parents of their child’s activities.
• As per the company, the tool will enable dialogue between parents and children.
• The tool will also allow parents to see who their teen children are chatting with using the app.

In a bid to make the experience safer for teens, Snapchat has teased a new tool that will allow parents to have better visibility of their child’s activities on the app. However, the feature is yet to be named and is still under development.

In an interview on WSJ Tech Live, as reported by TechCrunch, Snap Inc. CEO Evan Spiegel explained how the new product will work as a platform for family engagement. He said it will help both parents and teens have a dialogue of how their experience is while using the application.

The family centre will also offer more visibility to the parents in terms of who their teenage children are chatting with and what their privacy settings are. Spiegel also emphasized that Snapchat has been keeping its users’ profiles private by default, unlike other social media platforms until recently. He also said that the company does not market its app to kids under the age of 13 years.

The family engagement product will feature an education centre and tools that will enable parents to keep their children safe. This feature is being developed amidst the crackdown on social media giants by US lawmakers to implement safeguarding tools for minors on their services.

As per the company, it reaches up to 90% of 13 to 24-year-olds in the US and is growing worldwide including India. Earlier this year, Snapchat saw 150% growth in daily active users in India over the last year and was in triple-digit growth rate for five quarters in a row. It has also reached 60 million users in the country.

The new parental controls tool would be under the leadership of its new global head of Platform Safety, Jacqueline Beauchere, who recently switched to the company from Microsoft where she was serving as the chief online safety officer.

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