Snap Inc. announced on 20 August 2024 new in-app safety features for teenage users, including pop-up warnings when a user is about to share their live location with someone they have been connected to for fewer than 48 hours, and a machine-learning classifier trained to detect sextortion attempts by identifying message patterns associated with financial or coercive solicitation of intimate images. The updates are part of Snap's response to rising sextortion incidents documented by the FBI and will roll out globally on iOS and Android by the end of August 2024, with the company stating that the classifier will prompt teens to block and report suspicious contacts.
An alert delivered after a user has already received a coercive message gives the teen the burden of recognizing the threat and choosing to act. Guardii's dedicated anti-sextortion module intercepts the demand itself—whether text-based coercion, a threat to distribute images, or a request for payment—at the point of contact, blocking the message before the child sees it and immediately surfacing the incident to a parent, school safeguarding lead or law-enforcement liaison who can intervene, removing the decision from the child and enabling professional triage of what is often an acute and fast-moving threat.
