After introducing parent-managed accounts for pre-teens earlier this year, WhatsApp today expanded its parental controls to teen accounts, adding group activity alerts and additional restrictions for Meta AI. Here are the details.
WhatsApp expands parental control options
Earlier this year, WhatsApp announced a series of new features aimed at giving parents more control over their pre-teens’ accounts.
That included letting parents decide who can contact the account and which groups it can join, review message requests from unknown contacts, and manage its privacy settings, with changes protected by a parent-set PIN.
Then, a few weeks ago, WhatsApp further expanded the feature on iOS by adding a dedicated “Parental controls” section to the Settings app, making it easier for parents to find and set up a managed account.
Today, WhatsApp expanded those controls yet again, this time bringing parental controls to teens rather than just pre-teens, while giving parents more visibility into group activity and more say over how their teens interact with Channels, Status updates, and, perhaps more importantly, Meta AI.
With the update, parents can now receive notifications when their teen joins or leaves a group, as well as when a group they are already in “grows meaningfully in size.” Parents can now also choose how their teen can use Channels, whose Status updates they can see, and who is allowed to see their own.
As for Meta AI, parents can now choose between the standard experience designed for users aged 13 and up, or a stricter “Limited Content” option, depending on what they consider appropriate for their teen.
According to WhatsApp, the Limited setting further restricts the topics a teen can discuss with Meta AI. Meta AI features that rely on Private Processing are also unavailable when the setting is enabled.
As before, WhatsApp notes that these parental controls do not give parents access to their teen’s actual messages or calls, which remain protected by end-to-end encryption.
To learn more about WhatsApp’s new managed teen accounts, follow this link.
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