New Delhi: Snapchat has recently rolled out its latest upgrade to its Family Center that adds more tools for parents to understand better how their teens use the application. The update includes insights into the time spent on Snapchat, expanded information around new friend connections, and new safety and educational resources. The aim is to help families understand teen activity on the platform while continuing to respect user privacy.
Parents using the Family Center can now see the average amount of time their teen spends on Snapchat each day over the past week. This data is broken down by feature, including Chat, Camera, Snap Map, Spotlight, and Stories. The company has stated this is meant to give parents a clearer view of how time is spent on the application, whether through messaging, content creation, or video consumption. Snapchat has stated that the Family Centre already enables parents to see their teen’s friends list and any new friends added in the past week.
With the latest update, parents will also receive additional context when a teen adds a new friend. This includes trust signals such as whether the two users have mutual friends, whether the contact is saved in the teen’s phone, and which communities they may share. This added detail is intended to help the parents better understand how connections are formed on the platform. The update also comes with the latest step-by-step video designed to help parents and caregivers get started with Family Center. Snapchat has also stated that the video explains how the tools work and highlights available safety features.
The company reiterated that Family Center is designed to reflect real-world family dynamics by offering visibility into the activity and settings, without providing access to private conversations. Snapchat noted that the parents can already use Family Center to view recent contacts, manage content restrictions, share location within the family, and report concerning accounts. They can also limit access to certain features, including the My AI chatbot and, in the future, the AI-powered search engine Perplexity.
