After introducing parent-managed accounts for pre-teens earlier this year, WhatsApp has expanded parental controls to teen accounts, adding group activity notifications and additional restrictions for Meta AI. Here are the details.
WhatsApp expands parental control options
Earlier this year, WhatsApp announced a new set of features aimed at giving parents more control over their pre-teen accounts.
That includes letting parents decide who can contact the account and which groups it can join, check text requests from unknown contacts, and manage its privacy settings, with changes protected by a PIN set for parents.
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 managed accounts.
Today, WhatsApp Expand Those controls again, this time bringing parental control to teens instead of teens, while giving parents more visibility into group activity and more say in how their teens interact with channels, status updates, and, perhaps more importantly, Meta AI.
With the update, parents can now be notified when their teen joins or leaves a group, as well as when their group is “meaningfully larger.” Parents can now also choose how their teen can use the channel, which status updates they can see, and who is allowed to see their own.
For Meta AI, parents can now choose between a standard experience designed for users aged 13 and up, or a more restrictive “restricted content” option, depending on what they think is appropriate for their teen.
According to WhatsAppRestricted settings also limit the topics that teenagers can discuss with Meta AI. The Meta AI feature based on personal processing is not available when the setting is enabled.
As before, WhatsApp notes that these parental controls do not allow parents to access their teen’s real messages or calls, which are still protected by native encryption.
To learn more about WhatsApp’s new managed teen accounts, Follow this link.
