The social media platform Snapchat (NYSE: SNAP) has recently announced that it will take extra steps in order to ascertain much safer experiences for a teenage audience by implementing a set of family safety tools.
This past week, in an interview on WSJ Tech Live through TechCrunch, the CEO, Evan Spiegel, reported his personal ideals behind the creation of this particular Snapchat feature. "One of the goals with the product is to open up a dialogue between parents and their children about their experiences on the app," stated Spiegel regarding the feature. He made it known that he would like to inspire parents' visions for helping Snapchat to remain a place that is positively reinforcing.
Spiegel additionally suggested that "Family Center," a parental control system that will be managed by Snapchat, is in the process of being created. These particular parental controls will be surveyed under Jacqueline Beauchere, the newest global head of Platform Safety for Snapchat. Beauchere has been hired during a time which social media is under an especially large amount of investigation, particularly from inappropriate content for minors.
Although parental tools presently exist for Snapchat, they are not third party ones that would permit parents to take a closer look at what their children are doing on the app. Third party apps, however, that do allow parents to view their children's activity, could hit a major breach in privacy that could lead to serious repercussions down the road. This is why, according to Spiegel, it is especially important for parents to have dialogue with their children regarding the potentially harmful impact that technology could have on people overall.
"Unless businesses are proactively, you know, promoting the health and wellbeing of their community, regulators are always going to be playing catch-up," Spiegel stated, referring to a lawsuit surrounding the death of a teenager who dealt with cyberbullying.
With Snapchat's new safety features for teenagers in effect, families will hopefully feel much more comfortable with allowing their children to use the app. While some of the features could potentially be considered an invasion of privacy, they are nevertheless vital in opening up key conversations regarding potentially harmful consequences of modern technologies.