WhatsApp today expanded its parental controls to teen accounts, building on earlier features introduced for pre-teens. The update adds group activity alerts and additional restrictions for Meta AI, giving parents greater visibility into how teens use the platform.
Parents can now receive notifications when their teen joins or leaves a group, or when a group they're in grows meaningfully in size. They can also manage how their teen interacts with Channels, whose Status updates they can see, and who can view their own Status updates.
For Meta AI, parents can choose between the standard experience for users aged 13 and up, or a stricter "Limited Content" option that further restricts discussion topics and disables features relying on Private Processing. As with previous controls, WhatsApp emphasizes that parents do not gain access to teens' actual messages or calls, which remain protected by end-to-end encryption.
The expansion follows WhatsApp's earlier introduction of parent-managed accounts for pre-teens, which let parents decide who can contact the account, which groups it can join, and manage privacy settings protected by a parent-set PIN.
Source: 9to5Mac · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing