Parental controls dubbed Snapchat Family Center appear to be near release, with new screenshots based on backend code showing how it will function in the app.
How does the Snapchat Family Center work?
As you can see in the screenshots below, the Family Center will allow parents to see who their child is interacting while using the app, as well as who they’ve added and whom they’re following, among other things. That may be a new level of protection for parents, but it may also present issues for Snapchat, which has helped to cement its reputation as an alternative to other social networks by discouraging public posting and erasing messages.
That’s essentially how Snap has established its niche. While other applications are about broadcasting your life to the rest of the world, Snapchat is about interacting with a small group of friends and sharing your more intimate, secret thoughts without having to worry about them living on forever, returning to bite you later on. That also implies that more shady, harmful communications are taking place in the app. Various studies have investigated how Snap is employed for sending lewd texts and arranging dates, as well as how it’s used by drug dealers to arrange meetings and sales.
The idea of Snapchat is that users can send time-limited photos that might be embarrassing or just silly without a significant fear that they will find their way to other social media sites where they might live forever. Sounds good in theory but the problem is that there are ways to capture images, which is why no one should develop a false sense of security about sending them. This, of course, is why parents will be keen to get more insight into such, but I can’t imagine Snap users will be so welcoming of an intrusive tool in this respect.
However, if parents are aware that it exists, they may be forced to do so, which could be detrimental to Snap. Teenagers who use Snapchat will need to agree to have their family center monitored by Snapchat Family Center in order for the feature to operate correctly. Still, the defensive advantages may well be worth it, with random hook-ups and other interactions posing significant risks. And there are many young people who use Snapchat despite its dangers. However, the feedback may have an adverse impact on Snap’s popularity, as more parents become familiar with it. The new Snapchat Family Center has yet to be announced by the company but based on these images, it appears to be nearing completion.
This is not the first instance that a social media app is implementing parental controls. TikTok, for example, has continued to enhance its parental controls options since the debut of its in-app Family Pairing tool in 2020. The tool allows parents to link their TikTok account with a child’s account to regulate privacy, whether it’s suggested to other TikTok users, whether the kid can use search, and who, if anyone, can see their material. There’s also a switch that allows parents to put the account into an even safer mode for under-13 kids.
Last year, YouTube introduced parental control features that provide parents the option of restricting their children’s access to various degrees of YouTube content. Instagram also launched Family Center this March, which gave parents greater tools for monitoring their kids’ use of the app, including who has followed their account and how much time they spend on it. Its technologies enable parents to keep track of how long their children spend on the program and who has been following their account.
Snapchat statistics
According to the statistics provided by Omnicoreagency:
- Snapchat has 319 million daily active users (87.3 million are in the United States)
- 5 billion+ Snaps are created every day
- The average user spends more than 30 minutes per day on Snapchat
- 65% of 18-29-year-olds in the United States say they use Snapchat
We hope that you enjoyed this article on how does the upcoming Snapchat Family Center work. If you did, you might want to check out what is Snapchat Ring Light and how to use it to take better pictures, or how to add an eBay listing on Snapchat.
