In an effort to protect younger users, among others, Pinterest will introduce new privacy features such as the restrictions of mutual messaging and ability for allowing followers without a verified access in the app.

Firstly, starting from now, users aged 16 and older in private profiles will be able to choose whether their profile is public or private.

As Pinterest explained :

Once private, you can still reach out to your friends and loved ones with a unique profile link. Private profiles are not discoverable by others on the service and will be the default-and-only setting for teens under 16.

The site had made some waves earlier this year when it announced plans to make all the profiles of users 16 and under private by default and unable to change to 'public'. Today, the company is softening the policy for older teens, though teens under 16 will still be limited to private accounts.

So that's a slight policy shift which essentially gives older teens greater freedom to manage their in-app experience.

Pinterest is also introducing more follower controls for teenagers, and all followers are set to be removed from the profiles of users under the age of 16. Teen users will then be asked to review their follower list, to make sure they know exactly who is able to see their content.

That means that any teens who have built a following in the app will have some work to do to curate their audience, but it will ensure that teens have better knowledge of who's able to engage with their Pins.

Pinterest is also introducing new parameters for messaging and group board invites for teens:

Those under 16 years of age will have the ability to send and receive from contacts of mutual followers only, whom they would have accepted through a specific profile link that expires after 3 days or when they get 5 new followers with the shareable link.
That means the process will successfully prevent connections to only specified users by teens, making it more challenging for randoms to connect with youngsters in the application.

Pinterest is overhauling its safety protections for teenagers in the wake of a study published earlier this year describing how predators were using the app to gather photos of pre-teens and other minor girls through their accounts on Pinterest. In an NBC report, the network was able to find that some users were able to bypass Pinterest's already existing safeguards and access the profiles of young users, where they were able to view and download content and message youngsters directly within the app.

These new developments are meant to provide more safety for young users, and that is a key concern for all social apps.
It's hard to see how that will play out, especially since people can still lie about their age through the sign-up process. Still, Pinterest continues to release more tools to protect youngsters, which hopefully will enable more safety and control.