Digital safety has become one of the biggest concerns for American parents. In the University of Michigan’s 2025 National Poll on Children’s Health, parents ranked social media, screen time, and internet safety among their top concerns. According to the Pew Research Center, nearly half of American teenagers say they have experienced online bullying or harassment.
The risks extend beyond cyberbullying. Online drug dealers sell counterfeit pills that may contain fentanyl. During the first half of 2025, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children reported more than 23,000 cases of financial sextortion. In these cases, predators posing as peers persuade children to send sexual images and then threaten to distribute them unless they receive payment. Artificial intelligence chatbots have created another emerging concern, with companies such as OpenAI facing lawsuits alleging that their systems encouraged vulnerable children to consider suicide.
For most parents, conversation remains the first line of defense. In a Pew Research survey, more than nine in 10 parents said they had talked with their teenagers about what is appropriate to share online and how to interact with others on the internet. Parents can also use built-in parental control tools. Apple’s Screen Time and Google’s Family Link allow families to set screen-time limits, block or approve apps, filter web content, and locate devices. Location-sharing apps are also widely used; Life360, the largest service in this category, has nearly 98 million monthly users.
Increasingly, however, parents are turning to more advanced parental control and content monitoring apps. Instead of simply limiting access or locating a device, these services scan children’s texts, photos, emails, and online chats. When an algorithm detects language or images associated with potential danger, it sends an alert to parents. The market is expanding rapidly, with companies promoting artificial intelligence tools, chatbot companions, and other technologies designed to identify online risks. The broader parental control software market, which includes dozens of apps, was estimated to be worth $1.57 billion in 2025. Bark Technologies, one of the leading content monitoring companies, is projected to nearly triple in value by 2034 and claims to have scanned 11 billion messages.
Content monitoring tools are also being adopted by schools. Bark says its free school programs operate in more than 3,700 school districts and reach approximately one in 10 children in the United States. The company aims to alert families only when its filters identify potentially dangerous content. Other services, such as FlashGet Kids, offer additional features including screen mirroring and remote camera access.
These technologies have produced important success stories. Monitoring systems have helped identify suicide risks, expose online predators, and uncover potential school shooting threats. Yet digital surveillance can also cause harm. To examine how monitoring affects young people, I reviewed more than 600,000 ratings and reviews of major parental control apps and spoke with children, parents, and adults who were monitored when they were young. Some children appreciated the protection. Others described being punished because of false alerts, having private information revealed before they were ready, losing trust in their parents, and experiencing anxiety that continued into adulthood. Full names have been withheld to protect privacy.
Franziska Balzik
There are no simple solutions to the challenges of online child safety. However, child-safety researchers and advocates say that a better approach may be possible. One strategy is to require technology platforms to become safer by design and to make social media companies responsible for building stronger protections. This “duty of care” approach is being pursued in the United Kingdom, Australia, and several US states.
A second strategy focuses less on observing children and more on helping them recognize, manage, and report online risks. It also emphasizes the importance of trusted adults who can provide support when something goes wrong. This approach is often described as digital resilience.
Rather than monitoring children constantly, Wisniewski and her colleagues are developing tools designed to build resilience and strengthen relationships between young people and their parents. “If you define safety as no risk, then the way to keep kids safe is to keep them off the platform completely,” she says. “But when you define safety as the ability to protect and engage yourself without taking risks, the solutions look very different.” The difference, she explains, is similar to the difference between an abstinence lecture and comprehensive sex education.
Most content monitoring apps require two software components: one installed on the child’s device and another installed on the parent’s device. Parents typically connect the child’s accounts and select the activities they want to monitor, including text messages, social media, web browsing, location, and screen time. The child-side software sends activity to the company’s algorithmic classification system, which scans for content related to categories such as sexual exploitation, drugs, bullying, self-harm, and violence. When the system identifies a potential threat, it sends an alert to a parent dashboard. Similar monitoring software can also be installed on school-issued accounts and devices.
In some cases, these digital safety systems provide an important safety net. Titania Jordan, Bark’s chief marketing officer, said the FBI has repeatedly thanked the company for helping identify credible school shooting threats. “I hate that we have to exist,” she says. “But we’re very grateful that you do.” According to Bark’s annual report, the company’s classification technology is expected to alert hundreds of thousands of families to serious self-harm risks in 2025. School-monitoring competitor Gaggle made similar claims in its own annual report, crediting its software with helping save more than 1,000 lives during the 2024–2025 school year.
Source: www.technologyreview.com