After having developed it over the last few months, Snapchat has officially launched its new ‘Family Center’, which will enable parents to essentially monitor who their teens are engaging with in the app, while also keeping the specifics of their conversations incognito. Check out the official trailer for more details.
As outlined in the video, the Family Center aims to help parents understand how their kids engage with the app, without overstepping their privacy. Snap elaborates:
“Family Center is designed to reflect the way that parents engage with their teens in the real world, where parents usually know who their teens are friends with and when they are hanging out – but don’t eavesdrop on their private conversations. In the coming weeks, we will add a new feature that will allow parents to easily view new friends their teens have added.”
For The Family
Parents will also be able to report accounts they think might be a concern directly to Snap’s Trust and Safety teams, minus their child knowing, which could help avoid any unwanted attention that their kids might encounter in the app. To access the Family Center, parents will need to sign up for their own Snapchat account, then access the platform from there.
As outlined, teens will need to accept an invitation from their parents to join their Family Center dashboard, ensuring full transparency in the process. It’s an important and valuable update, though it does come with some level of risk for Snap, in that it can potentially reduce the app’s appeal. Snapchat’s ephemeral nature, over time, has made it a key platform for more risque and controversial sharing activity, offering more privacy than, say, the likes of Facebook, where family eyes are on you 24/7. But now, as Snap expands its security efforts and allows parents to start wading into their kids’ conversations, it could be a less appealing prospect for these types of engagements, watering down Snap’s value for younger audiences.
At the same time, various reports have also cited Snap as an avenue where the ill-mannered send lewd messages and arrange hook-ups; even drug dealers have learned to use its channel to organize deals. Logically, parents would want to glean more insight into such, as a means to protect their children, but again, it’s not hard to imagine Snap users not welcoming the idea of such an intrusive tool. Still, there’s a valuable purpose here and it seems like one compromise that Snap needs to make.
The Wrap
Regardless, it seems inevitable that Snap must accept that some of its current activity will drift off to other platforms as a result of implementation. Besides, Snap has already mentioned that additional features will come to the Family Center, which may or may not be a good thing for its engagement.
Overall, it seems like an available addition to the platform’s protection tools, which already include anti-creep messaging measures and limiting teens from showing up in search results. Safer users for less of them sounds like the better tradeoff, which is also ironic, seeing as how something that’s meant to keep you safe is always the stronger deterrent – young people truly are more outrageous now.
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