Snapchat's Safety Center Wants To Educate Parents

Snapchat is one of those big ironies of Internet history. It was originally designed to be safe and private due to the "ephemeral" nature of shared content. That, however, was used as a license to share revealing photos, which would eventually get leaked circulated to the public. Add to that more recent complaints about the company's security practices, or lack of it, and you would understand why Snapchat is now trying to save its reputation with a Safety Center that informs parents and teachers what Snapchat is all about.

It's not really shocking to learn that not all parents and educators are well-versed in the latest trends over the Web. In fact, some might very well be averse to them, especially after how the media can readily spin social networking as the worst thing to happen to modern society. Just as violations of security and privacy are bad, it is just as bad for Snapchat to lose its users, most of them from the younger generation, at the behest of their parents or guardians.

The Snapchat Safety Center, then, is like a handbook for parents and teachers. It tells them what Snapchat is all about and what the rules for using it are. Perhaps Snapchat wants to make sure parents see the service as a fun and safe community rather than the monster in the closet. In a way, it might also be subtly enlisting such parents, teachers, guardians, and organizations in actually making sure that their users (usually offspring or family members) understand the rules of the game. Because Snapchat is doing a stellar job at that.

The Safety Center does include the community guidelines for both users and their parents to see. Of course, if the users followed these rules in the first place, the scandals and shocking reveals associated with Snapchat wouldn't have happened in the first place.

This new campaign, which Snapchat is undertaking with organizations like ConnectSafely and iKeepSafe, is designed more to raise awareness among the older, non-user crowd and to encourage them not to panic about social networking, especially Snapchat. Whether or not that actually improves the users' behavior, however, is a totally different matter.

SOURCE: Snapchat