What Parents Need To Know About Snapchat

Everyone who hasn't lived the last 5 years under a rock has heard of the smartphone app called 'Snapchat'. With all of its cute face filters and funny voice changers, it's full of innocent fun.

It's full of not so innocent fun, too... as I have learned the hard way. 

If you are a parent, I urge you to keep reading. This app can be extremely dangerous for your easily persuaded tweens and teens. It's so simple for your kid to figure out how to do stupid, careless shit right under your nose. The scariest part is that chances are, you'll never know exactly what.

 Hidden Chat Rooms

Snapchat created chat rooms in order to compete against other sexual predator loving apps like Kik and Skype. Not only are you able to chat with people on your friends list, but you're able to go into "rooms" that are full of people just looking for easy victims. Here you can talk to just about anyone and everyone and most parents won't even know what rooms their kids are using or who they're talking to.  Remember when instant messaging was a new thing in the late 90's? These chat rooms are a lot like that with the old "age/sex/location". They are full of young girls advertising their need to cure their boredom and in turn, unknowingly advertising their naive need for attention. 

Pictures Disappear

Snapchat has the capability for users to 'snap' pictures that disappear after a certain amount of time. Kids seem to forget about the capability of screenshots that the recipient can take... thus making that incriminating photo sent across the country alive forever. A kid can say "but it tells me if they screenshot it". So what keeps that person from just using another phone to take a picture of the first phone? As the parent, you may stumble across a conversation on your kid's snapchat that seems to be blank... it's because they were talking in pictures instead. 

This is still the Internet and It's still permanent

Snapchat terms and regulations that everyone just clicks 'agree' to without reading them, state that any photo posted using their app becomes their property. Which means they can distribute and sell that picture however they see fit. Recipe for child abduction and sex trafficking anyone? 

My goal here isn't to demonize the social media app.

I just wish I knew the capability of this app (and many others that are beyond my expertise of use) before I gave that smartphone over to a tween with an undeveloped sense of consequences. 

1. 
   

Don't give your teenager the cyber world at their fingertips

and let it go unchecked. There should be no such thing as total privacy when you are responsible for their safety.