Snapchat is bringing enhanced location sharing to Household Heart, 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 inside the app’s Household Heart when their teen departs from or arrives at designated areas, 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 youngster’s location instantly inside Household Heart.
The primary time mother and father set this up, they ship a request asking their teen to share their stay location; notifications could be set for as much as three areas 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 residence.
With this new function, Snapchat could also be seeking to tackle Life360, which is a well-liked service that permits households to trace one another’s whereabouts and obtain updates when members of the family arrive at or depart particular areas.
“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.
Dad and mom may also quickly have the ability to see who their teen shares their location with on Snapchat. As well as, Snapchat goes to begin nudging customers who’re selecting to share their location with all of their mates on the app to overview who they’re sharing their location with.
Snapchat says greater than 350 million folks use Snap Map each month, and that these new options will enable households to remain related after they’re exterior.
The brand new options introduced on Thursday are rolling out over the approaching weeks.
Snapchat first launched Household Heart in 2022 to permit mother and father to achieve insights into how their teenagers are utilizing the social networking app. The corporate rolled out the hub in response to elevated strain from lawmakers who need social media apps to raised defend younger customers on their companies.
Since rolling out the hub, Snapchat has up to date it with further options from time to time to assist mother and father defend 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 Heart supervision controls.
