Facebook Messenger kids was created to give children a safe place to communicate through text, stickers, video, and gifs with friends that are pre-approved by their parents or guardians. This week, however, the kids’ messenger app has had to send notifications to thousands of parents about their children having access to strangers in the app.
What happened is that a technical error allowed kids to create a group message with friends who would then invite their own friends who, while approved for them, may not have been approved by the parents of the first child. Confusing? Ya, this is possibly why the flaw was even possible in the first place. Facebook says they have alerted parents whose children may have had this type of interaction and that they’ve disabled any chats that were created, using this flaw. The story isn’t over, though, as some are calling for the FTC to look in to the error since it may have resulted in a COPPA violation.
What Parents Should Know
The moral of this story centers around trust. It is important that, while we may trust our children, we can’t always trust who our kids are in contact with. We definitely shouldn’t blindly trust the companies who make the hardware and software that our children are using. When our kids use an app like Messenger Kids, the whole point of the app is that it gives parents control. When the control is hindered, even by a “technical error,” that is a severe violation. We can, however, take actions to protect our kids from dangerous effects that could come from these errors.
I recommend having a copy of the messenger kids app on your phone logged in to your child’s account. My wife and I are each logged in to one of our kids’ messenger kids apps and can see when they get messages and what the messages are about. We are notified when they receive a message and can look to see who it is from and even read it. I have, a time or two, jumped into the app to tell a friend to stop messaging since my son was past his allowed time for social media that day. I received a “yes sir,” and there were no more messages until the next day. We also use BARK to monitor their messages and alert us of any dangerous or inappropriate content.
Parents are gate keepers. Our job is to be sure our kids are growing up with guidance through every area of life. If they aren’t being taught how to manage social media and internet use safely then they will struggle to make healthy decisions when they are older. Messenger Kids is a good tool to help your kid learn the right way to use a messenger but it won’t work if you are uninvolved, pretending that the creators of the app only have your kid’s best interest in mind. The truth is that they want to provide you a service to make a profit. We cannot overlook that. It is our responsibility, and ours alone, to teach our kids how to be safe online. We should take it seriously. We should hold companies accountably when they have errors that put our kids at risk but ultimately we should be the ones making sure our children are protected on every app, site, and software they use.
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