Facebook owner Meta will allow parents to track how much time their kids are spending on Instagram, the company said on Wednesday and will soon launch a parental monitoring feature on the Quest virtual reality headset. The new parental controls are part of Meta’s promise to protect children using its social media app, after a whistleblower leaked internal documents that showed the company knew Instagram was using body parts for some teenage girls. The image is the cause of the problems.
The uproar as a result of the leaked documents caused Adam Mosseri, chief of instagramTestifying before Congress in December, where he was questioned online about the safety of children.
Instagram supervision tools will be available in the US starting Wednesday and globally in the coming months, meta said.
Parents will be able to see which accounts their kids follow and set time limits on how much time their kids spend on the app.
In May, Meta will launch a dashboard that includes supervision tools for Search Headset and will automatically block teens from downloading age-inappropriate apps on the Quest.
Parental monitoring on both Instagram and Quest will require the consent of teens, Meta reported on a . said in blog post,
The company said it plans to eventually allow parents to monitor their kids’ activities across all of Meta’s services from a central location.
© Thomson Reuters 2022