Snapchat on Thursday announced a set of safety measures for teen users. As part of the update, users aged between 13 – 17 years will be able to control who can connect with them through the app.
Teenage users will now be able to connect with people they know in ‘real-life.’ The app will enable this through existing friend connections or phone book contacts. Users will be notified with a pop-up if the app sees a suspicious person trying to make contact with a teen.
“For teenagers, we offer additional protections to keep the focus on connecting with people they actually know,” Jack Brody, Head of Product at Snap said. “When a teen becomes friends with someone on Snapchat, we want to be confident that it is someone they trust. We do not allow teens to communicate one-on-one with another person, unless they are already friends on Snapchat, or they are already existing contact on their phone.”
The platform has also set up safeguards that will curtail strangers from reaching out to a teen with whom they do not share a set of mutual friends. And in case someone does reach out, the app will allow the user to confidentially block the contact. Separately, default contact settings for teens will be kept at ‘friends and contact,’ making it harder for strangers to connect with young users.
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Snap Map, the platform’s map feature that lets users know where their contacts are, will be kept turned off for teen users. And if a teen user chooses to opt-in, their location can only be seen by their friends and contacts.
On data management, the platform noted that even though conversations were deleted by default, it can retain certain information to assist law enforcement agencies in investigations. “In case authorities want to follow up, we retain data for an extended period of time,” Brody noted.
The platform has also streamlined content flow for teens by filtering out age-inappropriate content in Stories and Spotlight sections.
“What we’re really doing is ensuring that any content that is labeled as suggestive on the application is just not served at all on the feeds of anybody aged between 13 and 17,” Uthara Ganesh, Head of Public Policy, India and South Asia at Snap said.
The company’s content labelling process is handled by detection tools that identify accounts that spam users with age-inappropriate content.
And if a partifular account is found to be showing the same sort of behavior by promoting a certain type of content then that account will be entirely banned -- “it is a strike system,” Ganesh added.
