Discord has introduced updates to its Family Center, enabling guardians to gain deeper insights into their teenagers’ usage behaviors, including purchases, top interactions, and time allocation. The primary objective is to provide parents with tools to monitor their teens’ engagement and spending on the communication platform.
In 2023, Discord initially launched the Family Center, offering an activity dashboard and a weekly email summary for guardians regarding their teen’s engagement. The recent enhancements aim to expand these monitoring capabilities.
Guardians can now track the total purchases made by the teen in the past week, encompassing items from Discord’s Shop and Nitro subscriptions. Additionally, they can monitor the total time spent on voice and video calls in DMs, groups, and servers over the previous week. Discord will also present the top five users and servers the teens interacted with in the last seven days. This move aligns with similar actions taken by social networks like Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat, which have implemented restrictions on teen interactions.
Discord is also introducing new parental controls within the app, allowing settings that only guardians can modify. They can manage who can DM their teen and decide if sensitive content should be filtered. Moreover, guardians can oversee data privacy controls for teens, dictating how Discord utilizes their data, including the display of personalized ads.
When teens report content on the platform, they now have the option to notify their parents or guardians of their actions. However, Discord ensures that the specific content reported will remain undisclosed, encouraging teens to engage in direct discussions with their guardians.
According to a blog post by Discord, the new features empower guardians with linked Family Center accounts to actively participate in fostering a safer online environment for teens while upholding their privacy.
Source: TechCrunch