TikTok today added a feature ‘Family Pairing’ to its platform that enables parents to remotely set restrictions on their kids’ accounts.
The new feature will let parents link their kids’ accounts to their own, where they can disable direct messages, turn on restricted content mode, and set screen time limits.
The new feature is a big leap for the platform from a year ago. Early last year, the company paid $5.7 million to the Federal Trade Commission over alleged violations of a children’s privacy law, in part for allowing users under 13 years old to sign up without parental consent.
TikTok in compliance with the law had made changes and added features like screen time limits to give users and parents more control over the app, which is incredibly popular with teens. TikTok began rolling out these same features, under the name “Family Safety Mode,” in Europe earlier this year.
Family Pairing, however, makes it a lot easier to set those limits. Once two accounts are linked, parents can control a kid’s settings from their phone. Before now, they’d have to set these restrictions within the app on their kid’s device. TikTok offered passcodes so that some settings couldn’t be turned off without consent, but it was clearly a less convenient solution and didn’t put the controls directly in parents’ hands.
Under the new system, parents will have to get the consent of their kids to have their accounts linked.
To get started, parents need to scan a QR code inside the digital wellbeing section of their kid’s account. Kids will be able to disable the feature at any time, though there are some roadblocks: parents will receive a notification, and they’ll have a chance to re-link the account in case it was disconnected by accident.
