If you have teens at home, you know how difficult it is to ensure their safety online, especially on social media. Snapchat is doing what they can to help teen safety on the popular app and making it more difficult for strangers to reach out to them.
New Snapchat Features to Keep Teens Safe
Last fall, Snapchat added a pop-up that warned teens that the message they are receiving is from someone not in their contacts and who doesn’t share mutual friends. It allows teens to pause and consider whether they really want to connect to the stranger. Snapchat claims it has led to 12 million blocks.
Snapchat is now beefing up those in-app warnings even more. They will also get a pop-up if a message is from someone who was previously blocked or reported by another user or from an area atypical to the teen.
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Another previous teen safety measure kept them off of Quick Add and Search, unless they had multiple connections with the person. This has been revamped, so a friend request won’t be allowed if there is a history of accessing Snapchat in areas of scamming activity. This works whether the friend request was initiated or sent to the teen.
Snapchat claims they have never offered public friend lists, as they can be used for sextortion schemes. They have also invested in research to help stop this crime and have collaborated with other platforms to prevent it.
TIP: learn how to do a Virtual Hangout in a group chat.
Other New Snapchat Safety Measures
Along with specific teen safety, Snapchat is also beefing up the safety of all users. While they have also sent all users reminders to check their account safety and privacy settings, and only share their location with friends, these reminders will become more frequent. Location sharing on the Snap Map is always off by default.
Snapchat is also introducing simplified location sharing, to make it easier for you to only share your location with your friends. On the same screen, you can check who you’re sharing with, update the settings, and remove your location from the map.
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Unsplash
There are also improvements to blocking tools. While you could easily block someone you no longer wanted to be in contact with, you can now block new friend requests sent from the same device as a previous block but sent from another account. This is because bad actors often open multiple accounts using the same device.
There are certainly more teen safety issues than there were when social media was first introduced, long before Snapchat came on the scene. I was bringing my teens up during the dawn of Facebook and Myspace. It was much more difficult then to keep my teens safe. Measures like the ones Snapchat keep introducing are ones we needed all along.
If you’re not a teen and looking to be more visible, consider setting up a public profile on Snapchat.
Image credit: Unsplash
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Laura Tucker –
Contributor
Laura has spent more than 20 years writing news, reviews, and op-eds, with the majority of those years as an editor as well. She has exclusively used Apple products for the past 35 years. In addition to writing and editing at MTE, she also runs the site’s sponsored review program.
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