Snap Launches Family Center So Parents Can Monitor Kids While Playing Snapchat

JAKARTA - As part of Snap's child safety efforts, Snapchat launched a new surveillance tool on Tuesday, August 9, which the company says mimics how parents and teens interact in the real world.

Snapchat's new "Family Center" hub allows parents and guardians to keep tabs on who their teen is messaging with on the app without revealing what they're saying to each other.

Both the guardian and the child must accept the Family Center invitation before the supervision tool can take effect. Once the invitation is accepted, the guardian can view their child's entire list of friends and the list of accounts they have interacted with over the past seven days and report about the account to the Snap Trust and Safety Team.

“Our goal was to create a set of tools designed to reflect real-world relationship dynamics and foster collaboration and trust between parents and teens,” Snap said in a Tuesday, August 9 blog post.

This feature is meant to copy real-life relationships, such as when parents allow children's friends to come but don't monitor everything they say.

Snap plans to roll out new Family Center features over the next few weeks, including a tool that allows parents to see new friends their kids have added along with additional content controls.

Snap's new parental controls come as lawmakers continue their work to tackle children's online safety. After Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen leaked internal documents revealing how the Meta platform could harm young users, some of the biggest tech platforms were summoned to testify before Congress. In addition to YouTube and TikTok there was also a representative from Snap before the Senate committee last October.

“Snapchat was built as a social media antidote” — distinguishing how Snap distanced itself from Facebook and other social media platforms,” Jennifer Stout, Snap's vice president of global public policy, said at Last Year's Session.

Haugen's revelations and subsequent hearings led to the introduction of a number of laws to deal with the safety of children online. Late last month, a US Senate panel approved two bills that would limit how technology platforms can collect and use data from young users, according to The Washington Post.

One bill, the Children and Teenagers Online Privacy Protection Act, would prohibit tech companies from collecting data on users between the ages of 13 and 16 without parental consent.

The second bill, the Children's Online Safety Act, would create an "erase" button that would allow young users to easily erase their data from the platform. The measures were approved amid a growing movement of advocates calling for lawmakers to raise the age limit in federal law to cover the privacy of children between the ages of 13 and 18, not just children under the age of 13.

Following Snap's October congressional hearing, the company announced that it was working on the Family Center tool it announced Tuesday. In a statement to The Verge last year, a Snap spokesperson said, “Our overall goal is to help educate and empower young people to make the right choices to improve their online safety and to help parents become partners with their children in navigating digital world."

In January, Snap rolled out a feature that limits the number of friend suggestions teens see on its app, via the Quick Add menu. According to the company, children between the ages of 13 and 17 only receive suggestions for accounts that "have the same number of friends as that person."