Meta has announced new parental controls for Instagram and
Messenger that will provide parents with more insights into how their children and
teenagers socially engage and spend time on the apps.
The parental control update on Messenger will let parents
know exactly the time duration a child is spending on Messenger. From the Meta
Family Center, parents will also be able to take a look at their child’s
Messenger contacts list, along with monitoring their privacy and safety
settings. Moreover, if a child reports someone on the app, parents will be
informed of it, as well as be able to see who can and can’t message their child.
Meta has expanded its measures for the protection of underage
users on Facebook Dating in the US. This means that users aged under 18 years will
not be allowed to sign up for and access Facebook Dating.
This age verification tool, however, is not a regular one. It
is powered by digital identity company Yoti, with whom Meta has been working
since June of this year. Yoti’s systems are equipped with training on a large amount
of global data of anonymous images belonging to a diverse range of people. As a
result, the company can almost accurately determine the ages of people using video
selfies.
According to Meta, it will launch the tool across its apps including Facebook, Instagram and Facebook Dating. During the test of the tool on Instagram, Meta discovered that about four times as many people were more likely to complete its age verification requirements as their attempts to edit their age from under 18 to over 18. This equated to “hundreds of thousands of people being placed in experiences appropriate for their age.”
Becoming an astronaut was a dream of many young children but it appears that this profession has lost some of its glamour, at least in the United Kingdom and the United States. Children in these regions are more interested in becoming a social media influencer rather than jetting off into space. Chinese children have opposite views, more than half (56 percent) of 8 to 12-year-olds said that they would most like to become an astronaut when they grow up and only 18 percent said they would become an influencer.
The infographic has the responses of nearly 3,000 children
who were asked which profession they are most drawn to. The options given were:
influencer/YouTuber, astronaut, teacher, professional athlete and a musician, as
part of a 2019 study by The Harris Poll and Lego Group. They could choose up to
three options.
Meta has announced new privacy updates for better protection
of people aged below 16 years on Facebook. These include stricter privacy
controls that allow them to limit what people view on their profiles, hide tagged
posts, as well as limit comments from non-friends.
Meta had earlier launched similar control settings on
Instagram as well, where users aged below 16 years had their accounts automatically
set to private.
Although these settings would practically not result in complete
safety, they could still facilitate younger users in choosing who can interact
with them, hence giving them more authority in managing their profiles and ensuring
awareness for self-protection.
Additionally, Meta is testing another safety option that limits children’s exposure to adult-owned accounts that appear suspicious. Meta defines a ‘suspicious account’ as one that “may have recently been blocked or reported by a young person, for example.” These accounts will be prohibited from sending messages to younger users and will also be removed from their recommendations.
Snapchat’s new Family Centre is providing parents with monitoring tools to supervise their children’s activities on the app, without
eavesdropping their private conversations, and understand the ways in which kids
and teens are engaging across the social platform.
Speaking about the update, Snapchat announced, “In the
coming weeks, we will add a new feature that will allow parents to easily view
new friends their teens have added.”
The social company further assures parents that they will be able to report any accounts that they find concerning in relation to Snap’s Trust and Safety teams, without informing their child about them, so as to keep any potential unwanted attention away from their children.
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