WhatsApp is giving parents more control over Teen Accounts: What’s new

WhatsApp has introduced new parental controls for Teen Accounts, giving guardians more visibility and control over how their children use the messaging platform. With the new update, parents can set teens’ profile photo and who can add them to WhatsApp groups. They can also manage group-related alerts, control Channels access, manage Status visibility, and others.

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WhatsApp teen account: What can parents control?

According to a WhatsApp blog post, parents can control teens’ usage of the platform across privacy settings, Meta AI chats, groups, and others. In privacy settings, parents can decide who can add their teen to groups and view their profile picture. They can also get alerts when the teen joins or leaves a group, or when the group reaches 30, 100 or 250 members.

These privacy settings are PIN-protected, which means only parents can change or manage the controls. Parents can also choose between two content settings for Meta AI. The default is the 13+ setting, which offers a standard experience for users aged 13 and above. On the other hand, parents can select “Limited Content”, which provides a more restricted experience.
Under this stricter setting, some private-processing-based features are disabled, including Incognito Chat and message summaries.

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“We’re building these controls step by step, based on what families tell us they need. All of these controls are being designed to support open conversations about how to use WhatsApp between parents and teens, while keeping everyone’s personal messages private,” WhatsApp said in a blog post.

The new safety features come around the time when India is exploring bringing safeguards for users under 18, or completely banning social media platforms in the country. Despite the added safeguards on teen accounts, WhatsApp will continue to provide end-to-end encryption across messages and calls.

To setup teen account, the user must be below 13, whereas parent or guardian must be 18 or older. These parent-managed accounts work on both iPhone and Android, but the device needs to have the latest version of WhatsApp installed.