Discord’s Family Center Adds Parental Purchase Monitoring
▼ Summary
– Discord’s Family Center now provides guardians with insights into teen purchases, top interactions, and time spent to monitor excessive usage.
– The platform has expanded monitoring to include weekly purchase totals from Discord Shop and Nitro subscriptions.
– Guardians can view time spent on calls and see the top five users and servers teens interacted with in the past week.
– New parental controls allow guardians to manage who can DM teens, filter sensitive content, and control data privacy settings.
– Teens can notify guardians when reporting content, but Discord won’t disclose what was reported, encouraging direct discussion.
Discord has significantly enhanced its Family Center with new tools designed to give parents deeper visibility into their teenagers’ activities on the platform. These updates focus on monitoring purchases, tracking interaction patterns, and managing screen time, providing a clearer picture of how teens engage with Discord’s various features. This initiative aims to help families foster healthier digital habits while maintaining a balance between oversight and respecting adolescent privacy.
Originally introduced in 2023, the Family Center offered a basic activity dashboard showing which servers a teen had joined, along with weekly email summaries for parents. The latest expansion builds on this foundation by integrating more detailed metrics. Guardians can now review the total amount their teen has spent in the past week, including transactions from the Discord Shop and payments for Nitro subscriptions, the platform’s premium service.
Additionally, the updated dashboard displays the cumulative time a teen has spent in voice and video calls across direct messages, group chats, and servers over the previous seven days. It also highlights the top five users and servers with which the teen interacted most frequently during that period. This move aligns with similar teen safety measures recently adopted by other major social platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat, which have also introduced restrictions on who can contact minors.
New parental controls have been integrated directly into the app, with settings that are exclusively manageable by guardians. Parents can now adjust who is permitted to send direct messages to their teen and enable filters to block sensitive content. They also have the ability to manage data privacy preferences, deciding how Discord utilizes their teen’s information, such as whether to display personalized advertisements.
Another notable feature allows teens to notify their parents when they report content on the platform. However, Discord clarified that it will not disclose the specifics of what was reported, encouraging open communication between teens and their guardians about such incidents. The company emphasized that these enhancements are intended to help parents actively participate in creating a safer online environment for their teenagers without infringing unduly on their privacy.
In a broader industry context, several technology firms, including Meta, YouTube, and OpenAI, have recently rolled out updates aimed at strengthening teen safety. Companies developing AI technologies, such as OpenAI and Character.AI, have also been refining their products to ensure they are appropriate and secure for younger users.
(Source: TechCrunch)
