WhatsApp introduces optional parental controls for teenagers

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WhatsApp is rolling out optional parental controls for teen accounts, which is a notable step for an app that has always focused on privacy. Parents who set it up can decide who can see their teenager's profile photo, who can add them to groups, who sees their Status updates and how Channels are handled. The controls are not mandatory and roll out gradually through app updates. Meta has been under pressure over teen safety across all its apps for a while

Parents will also get alerts when their teen joins or leaves a group, or when a group they are in suddenly gets much bigger. Those notifications do not include any message content. There is also a control for Meta AI, letting parents choose between the standard experience and a limited content setting for users aged 13 and over

To stop teens simply switching everything back, parents set a PIN that is needed to loosen any restrictions. That is a sensible design, as plenty of parental controls are trivially easy for teenagers to undo

Importantly, parents cannot read their teenager's messages or listen to their calls. WhatsApp says personal messages and calls remain protected by end to end encryption, and it frames the feature as supporting conversations between parents and teens rather than surveillance. That balance between safety and privacy is the tricky part. Plenty of privacy campaigners will be relieved by that. Child safety groups may want more

Group invites from strangers have been a real worry for parents, so controlling who can add a teen to groups seems useful. Would you use these controls if you have teenagers? And does keeping messages private strike the right balance?

WhatsApp introduces optional parental controls for teenagerswww.bbc.co.uk