While society is focused on how Facebook and Instagram fail to manage teenage audience security, Snap Inc. is adding and polishing new safety features to ensure that the experience Snapchat provides is secure. The company has announced a new set of family safety controls features recently.
Direct Control
Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel said that he sees benefits in allowing parents to have direct chats with their kids on Snapchat in order to discuss the content they explore. It’s not quite clear how that would help yet, but it will probably work together with other features of the announced Family Center. All we know so far is that this update will provide parents with insights into the content their kids consume. The company’s purpose is to make kids and parents partners in “navigating the digital world.”
What Do We Have Today?
The current set of parental control tools in Snapchat isn’t that invasive at all, but you can use third-party apps to fix that. And that’s where a problem pops up. The fact that third parties can collect and process your kids’ data from Snapchat is potentially dangerous. This means that Snapchat has to provide an in-house solution that won’t share any data with third-party services, even in the name of children’s safety. The company has already been lawsuit after a cyberbullied teenager suicide. That was enough for the company to ban a couple of messengers from using Snapchat API. Why not do that with all API users?
Catching Up
It’s very smart of Snap Inc. to start improving their app before regulators reach the platform’s presumably outdated teenager security policies. Have you or your kids faced any security issues or cyberbullying on Snapchat? You can tell your story in the comments below and don’t forget to share the story with other caring parents.
