Snapchat began turning its Find Friends feature off by default for UK accounts held by users under 18 on 6 November, after the communications regulator pressed platforms to strengthen protections for children. Ofcom, which announced the change that day, said a child must now opt in before the app suggests contacts or allows them to be found by phone number.
The feature is the mechanism by which a new account is populated with people the service thinks the user might know, and it also lets an account be located through a phone number stored on the device. Left on by default, it can introduce a child to strangers without any deliberate action by the child or by a parent.
Why defaults matter
Ofcom has said repeatedly that default settings, rather than parental effort, determine how much exposure children have to strangers on a platform. That argument explains why the regulator has concentrated on design choices instead of guidance for families: a setting that has to be switched off will, in practice, stay on for most users, and the burden of changing it falls on the household least equipped to know it exists.
Opting in changes the order of events. Rather than being shown a list of possible contacts and deciding case by case whether to accept them, a child has to decide in advance whether to be discoverable at all, and the default answer is no. That shift is small in engineering terms and large in effect.
The regulator described the change as an important step and linked it to its call to action asking technology firms to improve child protections. It also said it expects more from platforms under the Online Safety Act, which places duties on services used by children rather than on the households that use them.
Coverage is limited to the United Kingdom. Snapchat’s settings for users elsewhere are unchanged, so a British child’s account now differs from the global default in a way that a parent reading general advice about the app would not recognise.
Enforcement next
Enforcement explains the timing. Ofcom’s regime under the Act is moving from published codes of practice into enforcement, the phase in which the regulator tests whether companies have done what the codes require and can act where they have not. A change secured without a court fight is useful evidence that the model works, and cheaper than litigation.
Child-safety campaigners described the change as long overdue, a judgment that reflects how long the feature had been on by default before the regulator intervened. For the families affected, the delay itself is the substance of the complaint.
What happens next
For parents, the practical effect is that a child’s account will not surface suggested contacts unless the child chooses to turn the feature on, and the choice is now visible rather than buried in a settings menu. For the platform, the test is whether the setting holds when an account is created, restored or moved to a new device.
Whether other services change similar defaults without comparable pressure is unanswered. Ofcom has said it expects more from platforms, and this change suggests that expectation carries weight, while also showing how much depends on a regulator asking.
A single default does not make an app safe, and the regulator has not presented it in those terms. What it does is close one route by which a child could be contacted without choosing to be, while leaving the rest of the design, from messaging to content, outside the scope of this announcement.
