Facebook Updates Features To Messenger Kids So You Can Better Control Your Kids' Chats

Parents who have children may be familiar with Messenger Kids which helps them look after their kids. With new tools and features being updated, the app allows parents to know more about kids’ activities and have more control over their conversations. Parents can know who their children talk to and how often they chat, access and control settings and so on. Besides, the new blocking mechanism and Privacy Policy have been updated.

Introduced in 2017, Messenger Kids is a đeicated app for kids to keep in touch with others under parents’ oversight. Parents can control the contact list to choose who their kids can contact, like relatives and reliable friends to prevent risks of being targeted by bad people. Messenger Kids became really a great tool for parents to look after their children as the kids were previously using less controlled apps.

What are the new features of Messenger Kids?

Many parents don’t want their children to use smartphones and apps early, especially apps that allow users to interact. Others believe teaching children to use smartphones and those apps appropriately is more important. Messenger Kids provides parents with features to oversee their children’s online relationships.

With new features, parents can see who their children talk to over the past 30 days and how they chat with each other, video chat or text. Parents can skip reviewing chats with reliable people and spend time checking others. Parents can see the image log so that they will know whether the pictures and videos their children send and receive are appropriate or not, and decide to remove pictures or block someone if it is necessary.

When parents know their children’s activities (blocking or unblocking someone), they can identify special cases such as friends doing wrong to your kids then forgiven through, which you can see how your children react and solve their problems and can help them with some advice.

The new updated version allows parents to check chats with contacts your children have blocked. Parents can remove those contacts from the list if they want to block them completely.

Parents can use Remote device logout to make sure children’s accounts are logged out on devices you cannot control, like a lost phone or a suspicious device. Parents can also download everything in chats.

Privacy Policy has been also updated so parents and children can know more detail about data collecting on Messenger Kids. The policy is written in simple language with cute pictures so that children can understand and parents need to read it as well.

The app can collect a lot of data including a child’s profile phots, names, demographic details, their connection to their parents, along with contacts’ info, app usage info, device attributes as well as unique identifiers, network information, data from device settings, and info from feedback/contact forms or bug reports.

This information is collected to help the app operate better and send alerts to parents about kids’ activities. However, you need to read the policy carefully for unclear language about how they will use or share the data collected. Service providers providing support and technical infrastructure can also collect data but they must follow the policy.

If you use Facebook, you know that when you agree with their policy, it means that you are giving up your privacy to take benefit from the free service. But, as parents, you need to think carefully so that you can make a decision about whether you will let your children use it or not.

There are also some things in the policy that Facebook will update for Messenger Kids to support children when they get older as kids over twelve want more privacy so the policy will change so that both parents and children feel comfortable and safe.

Messenger Kids is an efficient tool for parents to look after their children but it belongs to Facebook. The market for children is potential but not directly monetized. Not many companies can invest into this but Apple is the best to rival Facebook.

About security and privacy, we all know that Apple’s iMessage is a large and reliable platform but it is not fun enough; and moreover, it is not available on devices running other operating systems so it is not suitable for big families to use together.

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