Discord Expands Parental Controls to Monitor Teen Activity
▼ Summary
– Discord is expanding its Family Center with new tools to help parents understand and manage their teens’ platform usage.
– Parents can now control sensitive media filtering and manage who can send friend requests or direct messages to their teens.
– The update provides guardians with visibility into teens’ recent purchases, voice call minutes, and most frequent messaging contacts.
– Teens receive full transparency about what information their guardians can see and can notify them when submitting requests.
– Discord confirmed a recent data breach affecting 70,000 users through a third-party service provider, including some government IDs.
Discord is significantly enhancing its Family Center with a new suite of parental control features aimed at giving guardians deeper insight into their teenagers’ platform activity. These tools are designed to foster communication and provide oversight without compromising a teen’s sense of independence. The update builds on the existing framework, offering a more detailed view of how young users interact within the digital space.
Parents and guardians can now activate settings to manage sensitive media, choosing whether to blur, block, or leave such content unfiltered. They also gain the ability to regulate incoming communications, deciding who can send friend requests, direct messages from servers, or message requests, options include allowing contact from all users, only server members, or friends of friends. A comprehensive set of data privacy controls rounds out the new capabilities.
Guardians will have access to specific activity reports showing purchases made within the last seven days, total minutes spent in voice channels over the past week, and a ranked list of the users and servers with whom their teen communicates most frequently. This provides a clear snapshot of engagement patterns without revealing private conversations. The content of messages sent by minors remains private and will not be visible to parents.
Teens are included in the process, receiving notifications when their guardian submits a monitoring request. Full transparency is maintained, ensuring young users understand exactly what information is being shared and which controls are active. Discord emphasizes that guardians don’t need technical expertise to use these features, stating the goal is to help parents stay informed and involved while respecting teens’ input in their online experiences.
These improvements are grounded in Discord’s teen safety principles, developed with input from youth research and perspectives. The rollout follows a recent security incident where approximately 70,000 users were affected by a data breach at a third-party customer service provider, including a limited number of individuals whose government-issued identification was exposed.
(Source: Games Industry)
