Discord announced today that it is launching new tools for its Family Center suite of parental controls and safety features. These include increased visibility into teenage users’ activities in a guardian-friendly fashion, while also increased autonomy and privacy for the user. It’s rolling these features out over the next week.
The platform revealed the specific features, which include a new dashboard that summarizes user activity of the past seven days, including purchases and calls, as well as the top five users and servers with which they’ve interacted. Teen users can also choose to notify their guardian if they’ve submitted a report, though the guardian won’t receive exact details on the nature of the report.
Savannah Badalich, Discord’s global head of policy, told GamesBeat in an interview, “You don’t need to be an expert in Discord in order to support your teen… Teens see exactly what their guardians see. Transparency was very important to us, so that teens know and feel some control with this. We think this is important because we want teens to feel like they’re part of this rather than being watched.”
Badalich also noted that that purpose of these changes is not to provide a deep insight into youthful users’ activities, but rather to open up the opportunity for conversation between teen and guardian. “We have a red line: We’re not going to be showing message content from teens to their parents. That’s very important because we want to engender conversation and trust between parents and teens… What we really want to be able to provide here is enough information for parents to see what their teens are doing and have conversations around safety, expectations and what it means to build friendships digitally.”