Safety and privacy tools for your child or teen in a world in Meta Horizon
Worlds are built with safety and privacy features that help people feel in control of their experience. We encourage you and your child age 10-12 (age may vary by region) or teen age 13-17 (age may vary by region) to become familiar with these settings and resources.
- Meta Horizon profile privacy settings: Child and teen profiles are automatically set to private when the account is created. Child accounts are always set to private and cannot be changed. Private profiles require the child or teen to approve follower requests. Within supervision settings, a parent can choose to also require their own approval of a child’s follower request. Teens can choose to change their Horizon profile privacy setting to public.
- Active Status: When setting up an account, a child or teen’s Active Status is automatically set to appear offline. Their world location is also hidden from other people in Worlds. You can change these settings to allow your child to have a more visible Active Status. Your child can ask for your permission to change their Active Status to online or joinable. If you approve their request, then they can change their Active Status at any time. Your child can’t change their Active Status to be more visible than what you’ve allowed.
- Personal boundary: Personal Boundary allows mobile users to be close to other mobile users while maintaining space between VR users and others.For users who are 13 years or older, this setting is On for people you don’t know by default. Teens can update this setting, and parents can lock it using our Supervision features so it cannot be changed by their teen. For children ages 10-12, personal boundary is “On for Everyone” and children and their parents can’t change this setting.
- Pause: Let your child or teen quickly take a break from a situation or space.
- Reporting, blocking and muting: Help protect your child or teen from anyone who makes them uncomfortable.
- Turning off the microphone: Prevent anyone from hearing your child or teen in a world.
- Voice channel: A feature that lets you choose to silence conversations from people you don’t know. We set voice channel to People you know automatically for all teens.
- World and event content ratings: We use content ratings to ensure children and teens have age-appropriate experiences within Worlds. For example, ages 18+ world and event ratings prevent a child or teen from finding, seeing, or entering spaces that contain 18+ content. Our policies prohibit children and teens from publishing ages 18+ rated worlds or events. Worlds or events violating this policy will be removed.
Parents and children can manage follower requests. Only teens can manage their follower requests.
A child with a parent-managed account can only voice chat with an approved contact.
We want to help prevent teens and children from hearing from adults they may not know. We take steps to prevent interactions between adults and unconnected minors. The “people you may know list” is completely blocked from children and we don't display any adults a teen doesn't know in their "people you might know" list. These protections are on for all teen users by default and are not able to be modified.
We encourage you to talk with your child or teen about ways they can feel safer.