Snapchat is bringing enhanced location sharing to Household Middle, its parental controls hub, the corporate introduced Thursday.
Customers have been capable of share their location with others on Snapchat for fairly a while now, however the brand new addition permits mother and father to get an alert from throughout the app’s Household Middle when their teen departs from or arrives at designated places, for instance from college. Earlier than, mother and father needed to discover their teen on Snap Map or go to their profile to see the place they had been; this new functionality makes it simpler for folks to maintain monitor as they’ll see their baby’s location straight inside Household Middle.
The primary time mother and father set this up, they ship a request asking their teen to share their dwell location; notifications could be set for as much as three places on the Snap Map. So mother and father might get alerted when their child leaves college, arrives at his piano lesson, after which leaves to go dwelling.
With this new function, Snapchat could also be seeking to tackle Life360, which is a well-liked service that enables households to trace one another’s whereabouts and obtain updates when members of the family arrive at or go away particular places.
“We’re adding travel notifications to Family Center to give parents more peace of mind knowing their teen has arrived at class, left sports practice on time, or even returned home after a night with friends,” Snapchat wrote in a weblog submit.
Mother and father can even quickly have the ability to see who their teen shares their location with on Snapchat. As well as, Snapchat goes to start out nudging customers who’re selecting to share their location with all of their buddies on the app to overview who they’re sharing their location with.
Snapchat says greater than 350 million individuals use Snap Map each month, and that these new options will permit households to remain linked after they’re exterior.
The brand new options introduced on Thursday are rolling out over the approaching weeks.
Snapchat first launched Household Middle in 2022 to permit mother and father to realize insights into how their teenagers are utilizing the social networking app. The corporate rolled out the hub in response to elevated stress from lawmakers who need social media apps to higher shield younger customers on their providers.
Since rolling out the hub, Snapchat has up to date it with further options from time to time to assist mother and father shield their teenagers. Nonetheless, mother and father could not even know that instruments even exist. Earlier this 12 months, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel revealed that 20 million youngsters use Snapchat in america and that solely round 200,000 mother and father use its Household Middle supervision controls.