Meta owned Instagram has announced a new set of safety tools for Parents on Wednesday. This new feature is specially design for protecting the most vulnerable users in its platform. According to the reports this is company’s delayed response to general criticism that it does not have enough security tools to protect the young users who are most exposed to the possibility of being harmed by the influence of social media.
Parents, tech watchdogs and lawmakers have uniformly been appealing the company from a long time to develop more safety features keeping the safety of teens in mind. Thus the company finally rolls out these new set of safety tools for parents. These set of safety tools rolls out because Instagram allows everyone order than 13 years to create an account. Get the details in this article.
Instagram New Safety Parental Control tools
Meta is reportedly enhancing parental Controls in its new introduced feature called “Family Centre”. According to the reports this new feature is design to be a Centralized hub of such safety tools that gives parents Control over what their kids can see and do across all of the company’s apps. The new set of supervision tools, gives parents and guardians some crucial controls to monitor the amount of time the young users spend on the app.
They can also access the details about which accounts they have recently followed and who has followed them. They will also receive notifications about any accounts the teens have reported. These new set of safety tools for parents is roll out first in the United States for Instagram. The report further adds that the company has plans to launch those tools across Meta’s VR platform for global users in May and to the rest of its apps including Facebook later in coming months.
The company mentions these tools as the “first step in a longer – term journey”. Though it is still not clear that what took them so long to take these initial steps to protect teens from the offensive side of its software. It is reported that at present the safety tools will have to be enabled by the teen Instagram users from their own account. But the company has mentioned that the option for parents to Commence the supervision mode will be applied by June this year.
New Safety Parental Control tools for teens
The report further adds that the company is planning to develop more controls for parents which includes restrictions on app usage to certain hours. Also a setting that would allow more than one parent to Co-supervise a teen’s account. Last year, Instagram has faced severe survey over its lack of tough security features designed for the protection of young users. Technically the platform does not allow anyone who is under the age of 13 to create account in the app.
But there are very few preventive measures to stop kids from doing so. In an earlier report Instagram announced that it is planning to apply AI and machine learning to confirm that it’s users are minimum 13 years old or more. But kids easily find way to sign up. In a blog post of last year the company mentioned about this problem saying that they already know that while many people can be honest about their age. The young users may always lie about their date of birth.
So to stop this from happening the company wants to take some steps. But to verify peoples age online is such a complicated job that many people in the industry are struggling with it. The company States that the problem of screening young uses is the reason why it planned to build an Instagram version specially designed for kids. This was reported by BuzzFeed news early last year.
Instagram New Safety tools for Parents
However other social media apps like YouTube and Tik Tok already have updated versions of their own apps which are particularly customized for children who are under 13. Instagram seems to be late to introduced this new set of safety tools for parents for it’s young users. According to the reports of the “Wall Street Journal” published last year on September, the app was having a negative impact on the mental health of teen aged girls.
The Journal published an investigative series which reveals a scandal that accelerated the temporary end of Instagram for kids. The parent company Meta had to discontinue the plan of Instagram for kids considering the WSJ reports. General peoples negative reactions and extremely critical and unfavorable response from the Industry regulators. The reports also reveal that along with above mentioned circumstances, Meta is also facing a tough competition with other social media apps.
TikTok has developed its own tools, which enables parents and guardians to keep track of their kids app usage two years back. It has also been upgrading those controls to be more detailed since then. In 2019 Tik Tok introduced its own kid-mode app named “Tik Tok for younger users”. This app will to restrict risky features like messaging and commenting.
Though this new set of safety tools for parents rolled out by Instagram is a start, and latest attempt to quell the concerns of parents let us see if they are enough. For more updates on all tech news keep following us.
