Snapchat will enhance location sharing in its parental control hub, Family Center, the company announced Thursday.
Users have been able to share their location with others on Snapchat for quite some time, but the latest additions allow parents to share their location on the app when their teen leaves or arrives at a designated location, such as school. You can now receive alerts from within Family Center. Previously, parents had to find their teenager on Snap Map or visit their profile to see where they were. This new feature allows parents to see their child's location directly within Family Center, making it easier to track them.
When setting this up for the first time, parents will send a request to their teen asking them to share their location. Notifications can be set in up to three locations on the snap map. So parents can be alerted when their child leaves school, arrives for piano lessons and returns home.
With this new feature, Snapchat could be trying to take on Life360, a popular service that allows families to track each other's whereabouts and receive updates when family members arrive or depart from a certain location. there is.
“We've added travel notifications to Family Center to let you know when your teen arrives at class, leaves sports practice on time, or even returns home after spending the night with friends. to give parents even more peace of mind,” Snapchat said in a blog post.
Image credit: Snapchat
Parents will soon be able to see who their teens are sharing their location on Snapchat. Additionally, Snapchat will begin prompting users who choose to share their location with all their friends on the app to see who they're sharing their location with.
Snapchat says more than 350 million people use Snap Map every month, and these new features will help families stay connected while on the go.
The new features announced Thursday will be rolled out over the next few weeks.
Snapchat first launched Family Center in 2022 to help parents understand how their teens are using the social networking app. The company rolled out the hub in response to growing pressure from lawmakers to give social media apps better protections for young users on their services.
Since rolling out the hub, Snapchat has continued to update it with additional features to help parents protect their teens. However, parents may not even know the tool exists. Earlier this year, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel revealed that 20 million teenagers use Snapchat in the U.S., but only about 200,000 parents take advantage of Family Center's supervisory controls. revealed.