Everyone’s heard the horror stories about how young people lose their personal contacts, or how hackers gained access to photo albums and photos taken on Snapchat. However, if your child is using Snapchat to send private messages or share pictures with their friends, you need to be aware of the privacy risks.
With several ways to gain access to or spy on Snapchat, it’s essential that you understand more about the app itself, how it works, and how you can keep your children safe.
In this article, we’ll go over Snapchat safety for children and explain how easy it is to safeguard their snapshots from strangers and other people who don’t know their personal and private information.
Why is Snapchat so Popular?
First, before we get into details about Snapchat safety for children, you need to understand why the app is so popular in the first place. Snapchat can be a fun social media app to use. While it works like any other social media app, allowing you to have conversations with unlimited friends, its primarily image-based format makes it great fun! You can share snaps with multiple friends, add them to your stories, or even start streaks with your friends.
That said, one of Snapchat’s most appealing aspects is its security features. Snapchat uses highly secure servers, and they are encryption and authentication complex. They are able to resist unscrupulously managed access due to the complex coding, and the fact that it is impossible for anyone but the intended recipient to gain unauthorized access to your snaps.
Potential Security Risks on Snapchat
However, if you choose to give out a passcode or login information to someone you’re not very sure of, you could be setting yourself up for some uncomfortable privacy breaches. Teenagers often tend to share their passcodes with their friends, and this is something that parents must warn them about, especially given the dangers of someone mishandling their sensitive information.
Some people may be concerned about the safety of such apps because they do not feel safe giving their children unsupervised access to social media sites like Snapchat. In the first place, they should never give out a passcode to anyone they do not trust, and you should also educate your children about the perils of Snapchats.
Children need to understand the potential danger inherent in these kinds of applications, and you should always teach them to use them wisely. You must educate them of the dangers of sharing private information on an app like Snapchat, especially since it makes it easy to share pictures. As such, you must always be careful of your debit or credit cards to ensure your children don’t get their hands on them. While they might share pictures of these cards as a joke with their friends, it can lead to serious problems.
The Snapchat app was originally designed as an instant messaging client for young children, who were using it to communicate with their friends. However, this application has evolved into something much more than that. In recent months, it has gained a lot of popularity among teenagers and has started to rival messenger services like Yahoo or Facebook. This is because Snapchat allows you to chat with strangers from all over the world; even those who may be located thousands or even millions of miles away.
This app is also a top favorite among people who particularly want to interact with strangers online.
How to Ensure Your Children’s Safety on Snapchat
Teach Kids Not to Share Private Information
There are some major issues that you need to address when it comes to Snapchat safety. One of the main issues is the sharing of your personal details, which is more likely to happen if you allow your children to use Snapchat.
Another important issue that needs to be addressed is the fact that Snapchat does not have any kind of built-in security. Therefore, you need to be responsible enough to teach your children how to use the security features that Snapchat offers, to keep themselves safe from threats and harassment.
Set Up Strong Privacy Settings on Their Accounts
If you want to ensure Snapchat safety for your children, you need to put in place various safety precautions that you will be able to use to make Snapchat safe for them to use. You can teach them to set strong privacy settings whenever they are using the Snapchat application.
Teach Them to Be Selective About Their Contacts
Moreover, you can also instruct them to never share their snaps with anyone and everyone, as this can prove to be dangerous for them as well. They must be told of the dangers of inviting random strangers into their contact list as well. A friends-only policy is always the best way to go.
Enable Two-Fator Authentication
Enabling two-factor authentication is among the best ways for them to keep their Snapchat account safe from unauthorized logins. Here’s how you can enable this –
Go to Settings > Click on the Cog icon > Select Login Verification > Click on Continue > Select verification via Text or an authentication app > Enter the verification code supplied.
In Conclusion
While Snapchat is an incredibly popular social media app, it comes with its own risks, especially when being used by children. With these techniques, you will be able to protect your children from the perils that Snapchat may present them with, and will keep them happy and healthy as they go about their daily lives.