Snapchat Adds Parental Controls to Snap Map
Snapchat is rolling out enhanced Family Center controls, giving parents more oversight of their teens' location-sharing on Snap Map. The move allows guardians to monitor interactions and visibility, signaling a market-wide shift towards more privacy-centric and opt-in location features amid scrutiny of social media's impact on youth.
Snap Map first launched in June 2017, immediately raising privacy flags among safety advocates for its ability to broadcast a user's precise, real-time location each time they opened the app. In response to concerns about potential stalking or bullying, Snapchat has consistently highlighted that location sharing is an opt-in feature and that users can enable "Ghost Mode" to hide their position. The new controls are an expansion of the Family Center, which Snap introduced in 2022. To activate the supervision features, parents must create their own Snapchat account, add their teen as a friend, and have the teen accept an invitation to the Family Center. Once enabled, guardians can view their teen's friend list and see who they've communicated with over the past seven days, though the content of messages remains private. This update is part of a wider industry reaction to scrutiny over youth safety online. Meta's Instagram includes parental supervision tools that can notify a parent if their teen enables location sharing. Both Google's Family Link and Apple's Screen Time offer extensive, device-level controls for managing location services and app usage. The underlying location-based services (LBS) technology is seeing massive growth in other sectors. The location intelligence market is forecast to surpass $50 billion by 2030, with startups like ZaiNar (satellite-free location tracking) and World Labs (3D spatial AI) recently securing major funding rounds of over $100 million and $1 billion, respectively. In sports, geofencing is used to send targeted offers to fans in stadiums, while augmented reality overlays provide real-time player stats. The location-based entertainment market, which includes AR-enhanced experiences and VR arenas, was valued at over $6 billion in 2025 and is projected to exceed $23 billion by 2032. The health and fitness app market, a key vertical using GPS for activity tracking, is also expanding rapidly, with a global valuation of over $10.5 billion in 2024. North America leads this market, driven by high smartphone and wearable device penetration, with the U.S. market alone expected to reach over $10.6 billion by 2032.
