Kakao is empowering parents with enhanced digital safety tools, having recently launched a comprehensive **parental control feature** within its flagship messenger, **KakaoTalk**. This innovative update allows guardians to effortlessly establish detailed usage limits for their underage children directly within the application, ensuring a safer online environment.
This essential **child safety feature** integrates with the existing **Kakao family account** system. Guardians can now invite minor children into their family group, enabling them to actively manage access to sensitive functions such as short-form content and open chat features. This provides a new level of **minor protection** on the platform.
Activating these **guardian controls** is streamlined and user-friendly, requiring no separate customer service procedures. A family account can be conveniently set up via identity verification using a Kakao certificate within the app’s settings. Once the account holder creates the group, members can be easily added. The process is finalized when a guardian sends a connection request and the child accepts, registering them as a protected user under the family account.
The core of this update is its focus on providing guardians with **granular control** over how minors interact with specific KakaoTalk services, moving beyond basic restrictions to offer nuanced management options.
For **short-form content**, guardians gain the ability to manage viewing, commenting, and search functionalities independently. This means access to the entire short-form service can be restricted, or specific interactive elements like commenting or search can be individually limited to foster responsible digital habits.
Regarding **open chat**, minors can be effectively blocked from creating new chat rooms or joining existing ones. Furthermore, guardians can opt to require explicit approval for each open chat room a child attempts to join, offering peace of mind. Should participation in a particular open chat be necessary – for instance, for school or academy-related activities – guardians will receive notifications, allowing them to conveniently approve or deny access.
Kakao emphasizes that this robust **child protection feature** operates on a foundation of mutual consent between guardians and minors, promoting transparency and trust. Notably, users aged 14 and older possess the autonomy to request the disabling of this feature without guardian approval, and all parental controls are automatically lifted once the user reaches 19 years of age.
This latest enhancement builds on Kakao’s ongoing commitment to **minor safety**, with initial protective measures introduced in December 2021. The process was further simplified in April last year, allowing legal guardians to independently request these protections. A Kakao official affirmed, “We are continuously refining KakaoTalk’s policies to better safeguard minors. We also maintain a dedicated category for crimes involving children and adolescents, implementing stringent measures – including permanent bans – after thorough review of all reported cases.”
yeeun
