The Family Center, a popular disappearing photo and chat app favored among teens, has been released in the United States in the coming weeks, giving parents the ability to see who their kids are chatting with.
The Family Center is designed to reflect the way parents engage with their teens in the real world, where parents usually know who their teens are friends with and when they are hanging out, but don't eavesdrop on their private conversations, the company said in a press release.
The new feature requires that both the child and the parent consent to the monitoring, according to press materials. Once a parent has been given access to a teen's account, they will be able to see a list of their teen's friends and report anything suspicious. The tool wouldn't notify a parent of any alternative Snapchat accounts a child might have.
For years, parents of teens who have died after purchasing drugs laced with fentanyl from people on Snapchat have been calling for the company to work to prevent such tragedies from happening again.
Parents can be alerted about certain types of chats and content that is deemed dangerous because of parental monitoring apps access to Snapchat chats.
Snapchat and several other apps have pushed back against this idea, citing privacy concerns.
Sam Chapman, the father of Sammy Chapman — a teen who died after taking fentanyl-laced drugs found on Snapchat, has worked with the Organization for Social Media Safety to develop Sammy's Law, a bill that would force social media companies like Snapchat to work with surveillance apps.
Last week, NBC News reported that Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla. was working to find a co-sponsor to introduce Chapman's bill to the House in the coming weeks.
Wasserman Schultz called Snapchat's new feature a step forward, but she believes that children are still at risk.
She wrote in an email that parents should be able to know more than just the name with whom their child is communicating. We need to pass Sammy's Law to protect children not only on Snapchat, but on all social media platforms, because Snapchat and other platforms are not a substitute for parents needing to keep their children safe. In an email, Chapman criticized Snapchat's announcement, calling it a PR beard for what is actually happening, which is that kids are dying. Chapman said that the new tool would not prevent a teen from switching accounts or platforms to avoid monitoring.
A Snapchat representative said that it was against its terms of service to have multiple accounts, and that if a person has multiple accounts, they would have to log out of the app to toggle between them.
Marc Berkman, CEO of the Organization for Social Media Safety, questioned the utility of the tool.
The safety tactic can be very limited in its effectiveness, he said, because parents have always had the ability to see their children's Snapchat friends directly through their children's accounts. A parent seeing a kid add to Snapchat often will have to trust the child as to who is being added or undertake heroic verification processes. We are fairly confident that most teens are not going to be truthful with their parents about the drug dealer they just added to their account. Snapchat said in a blog that it developed the Family Center to empower parents and teens in a way that protects a teenager's autonomy and privacy.