Child-monitoring apps prevent real harm, but also cause it

Digital harm has become the top fear of American parenthood. In the University of Michigan's 2025 National Poll on Children's Health, parents' three biggest worries were social media, screen time and internet safety. Nearly half of American teenagers say they have been bullied or harassed online, according to the Pew Research Center. The dangers behind that fear are concrete: online drug dealers sell counterfeit pills laced with fentanyl; in the first half of 2025 the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children fielded more than 23,000 reports of financial sextortion, in which someone posing as a peer extracts a sexual image from a child and threatens to publish it unless paid; and chatbots are a newer danger, with companies including OpenAI facing lawsuits alleging their bots coached children toward suicide.

Most parents' first response is conversation: more than nine in 10 tell Pew they have talked with their teens about what is appropriate to share online and how to treat peers. They also lean on built-in tools such as Apple's Screen Time and Google's Family Link, which cap screen time, block or approve apps, filter content and track devices, plus location-sharing apps like Life360, which has nearly 98 million monthly users. A growing number go further, installing content-monitoring apps that scan a child's texts, photos, emails and chats and alert parents whenever an algorithmic classifier flags something as dangerous. Two pieces of software are involved, one on the child's device and one on the parent's; the parent chooses what to surveil, and matching software can be loaded into school-issued accounts too. The broader parental-control-software market, spanning dozens of apps, was worth an estimated $1.57 billion in 2025 and is projected to nearly triple in value by 2034, with the newest growth wave marketed around AI and pitched as a counter to chatbot companions. Bark Technologies, the category's current leader, says it scanned 11 billion messages tied to 7.5 million children in the US in 2025; its free school program now runs in more than 3,700 districts, covering about one in 10 US kids. Bark says it aims to flag only content that trips its filters, while some rivals, such as FlashGet Kids, go further, adding screen mirroring and camera access.

MIT Technology Review's investigation, which scraped more than 600,000 reviews of the leading apps and interviewed parents, kids and adults who were monitored as children, finds these apps have had genuine successes: they have prevented suicide attempts, intercepted predators and averted school shootings. Titania Jordan, Bark's chief marketing officer, says the FBI has thanked the company on multiple occasions for flagging credible school-shooting threats. Bark's own annual report says its classifiers alerted hundreds of thousands of families to severe self-harm risk in 2025, and rival Gaggle's annual report credits its software with saving more than 1,000 lives in the 2024-25 school year; both figures come only from the companies' own reporting, with no independent verification cited.

But the same investigation finds real, measurable harm. Across the review population, screen-time limiters and location trackers drew four- or five-star ratings 74 to 78 percent of the time, while OS-level controls and content-scanning apps fared worse, at 44 and 48 percent positive respectively; parents' top complaint was unreliability, apps disconnecting, missing real problems or raising false alarms. Of roughly 14,000 reviews traceable to kids being monitored now, or to adults recalling being monitored as children, about one in seven were grateful on balance, but nearly one in five described feeling watched or stripped of privacy, about one in 10 said monitoring broke their trust in their parents, and one in 12 described anxiety or distress. Among adults specifically looking back on their monitored childhood, one in eight reviews describes lasting harm; when the reporter tried to go beyond the anonymous reviews and interview people directly, only one agreed to speak on the record, the rest citing privacy worries and lingering anxiety. That tracks with developmental psychology: a 2019 meta-analysis in the European Journal of Developmental Psychology, pooling 31 long-term studies, found that children naturally disclose less to their parents as they age, which researchers read as a normal part of building independence.

False positives recur throughout the piece. Grant Callaghan, an Australian father who tried several monitoring apps on his 13-year-old son before building his own, says "Ninety-nine percent of the alerts are garbage," citing one flagged as bullying because two kids called a third "annoying," and another flagged as "medically concerning content" because a child mentioned a headache. When the reporter ran Bark on a test phone configured as a 10-year-old's, the app manufactured a grooming scenario out of a random password saved in the Notes app. Jordan does not dispute that false alarms happen. She cites a soccer player whose photo of a net-scraped wrist was flagged as possible self-harm, and argues over-flagging is safer than under-flagging: "You'd rather know that than not know that." A 2021 study CDC researchers ran with Bark found that students who tripped multiple risk flags were far likelier to later trigger a severe self-harm alert, suggesting the flags are not pure noise. Some flags cause direct harm, though: S., an 11-year-old on the autism spectrum, messaged her best friend about whether a service dog might help with her meltdowns or keep her from self-harm; Bark alerted the school principal and both girls' parents, citing self-harm content, and her friend's parents cut off contact between the two. More than a year later, they still do not speak. Separately, in a survey by the Center for Democracy and Technology, nearly a third of LGBTQ+ students said they or someone they knew had been outed by school monitoring software; Jordan says Bark does not itself flag sexual orientation, though conversations about it can be swept up when the app screens for sexual content, and that a parent's rejection in response is "a parenting failure, not a child safety feature working as intended." The one person willing to be interviewed on the record, identified only as M. and now 19, says her mother installed a monitoring app before handing over her first smartphone at 13. M. says she had already been abused from a young age, and that the first serious beating came shortly after she texted a friend about her depression.

The piece frames Pam Wisniewski, a principal research scientist at the International Computer Science Institute, a nonprofit affiliated with the University of California, Berkeley, as the researcher pushing an alternative. At 14, Wisniewski left an abusive home, where she had been isolated in a trailer at the end of a seven-mile dirt road; she taught herself to type on AOL Instant Messenger and found both community and danger online, including once sending her address to a stranger in New Mexico who years later turned out to have killed someone. That history has shaped well over a decade of her research into what family online safety should look like. Rather than surveillance, she and other advocates promote "resilience": teaching kids to recognize risk, cope with it and turn to a trusted adult, which she likens to sex education rather than abstinence-only lectures. A separate policy track, "duty of care" rules that would force social platforms themselves to build in guardrails, is advancing in the UK, Australia and a number of US states. "There's so many ways for teens to get around [controls]," Wisniewski says. "And at the end of the day, the biggest thing that most of these apps are telling kids is that we don't trust you."

Key facts

Bark, the leading content-monitoring app, says it scanned 11 billion messages tied to 7.5 million US children in 2025, and its free school program now covers more than 3,700 districts, about one in 10 US kids.
Of about 14,000 reviews traceable to monitored kids or adults recalling being monitored, roughly one in seven were grateful on balance, but nearly one in five felt watched or stripped of privacy, about one in 10 said it broke their trust in their parents, and one in 12 described anxiety or distress.
Content-scanning apps got positive reviews only 48 percent of the time, and OS-level tools like Apple's Screen Time or Google's Family Link only 44 percent, versus 74 to 78 percent for simple screen-time limiters and location trackers; parents' top complaint was unreliability, from missed real problems to false alarms.
Nearly a third of LGBTQ+ students surveyed by the Center for Democracy and Technology said school monitoring software had outed them or someone they knew.
Researcher Pam Wisniewski and other child-safety advocates argue for teaching kids resilience, recognizing risk, coping with it, and going to a trusted adult, rather than surveillance, comparing it to sex education versus abstinence-only lectures.

Why it matters

Digital-harm fear now tops the list of American parental worries, according to the University of Michigan's 2025 National Poll on Children's Health. The dangers behind that fear are real: nearly half of teens report online bullying, fentanyl-laced pills circulate among drug dealers who target kids, more than 23,000 financial-sextortion reports reached the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children in just the first half of 2025, and AI chatbots have added a new risk, with OpenAI among the companies facing lawsuits over alleged harm to children. The industry built to answer that fear is large and growing fast: an estimated $1.57 billion market in 2025, expected to nearly triple by 2034, with its next wave of growth marketed specifically around AI. Monitoring software now reaches beyond individual households into schools, where Bark's free program alone covers roughly one in 10 US kids; whether it actually delivers the safety it promises is a question with public-scale consequences, not just a private parenting choice.

Who it affects

Parents deciding how closely to watch their kids online; the kids and teens being monitored, including vulnerable groups such as LGBTQ+ teens at elevated risk of being outed by school software and neurodivergent kids like S., whose Bark-flagged message cost her a friendship; school districts, more than 3,700 of which use Bark's free monitoring program; the monitoring-app companies themselves (Bark, Life360, Gaggle, FlashGet Kids), whose growth pitch increasingly leans on AI; and lawmakers in the UK, Australia and several US states pursuing "duty of care" rules that would shift responsibility onto the platforms instead.

How to use it

The tools parents already reach for range from least to most invasive. Conversation comes first: more than nine in 10 parents say they talk with their teens about online conduct. Free OS-level controls, Apple's Screen Time and Google's Family Link, cap screen time, block or approve apps, filter content and track devices without reading messages. Location-only apps like Life360 add tracking alone. Content-monitoring apps go further, reading texts, photos, emails and chats through algorithmic classifiers and alerting parents to flagged categories; Bark offers a free tier through schools, while competitors like FlashGet Kids add screen mirroring and camera access. The piece's proposed alternative is not another tier of surveillance software but a change in approach: build kids' resilience, their ability to recognize risk, cope with it and tell a trusted adult, and back "duty of care" rules that put safety obligations on the platforms rather than on parental software.

How solid is it

The harm findings rest mainly on the reporter's own analysis of more than 600,000 scraped app reviews, a large sample the piece itself flags as self-selected and skewed toward strong feelings; the closer look at roughly 14,000 reviews from monitored kids and formerly monitored adults is a smaller, more targeted slice of that set. The strongest benefit claims come from the companies themselves: Bark's "hundreds of thousands of families" alerted to self-harm risk and Gaggle's "over 1,000 lives" saved in the 2024-25 school year are both figures from the companies' own annual reports, with no independent verification cited in the piece. The best outside evidence that flags carry real signal is a 2021 study CDC researchers ran together with Bark, not a fully independent source either. The developmental-psychology claim, that kids naturally disclose less as they age, rests on a more conventional academic base: a 2019 meta-analysis pooling 31 long-term studies.

Risks and caveats

False positives are common, sometimes absurdly so: one parent puts the false-alarm rate at "ninety-nine percent," citing a bullying flag triggered by kids calling a peer "annoying" and a "medically concerning content" flag on a headache complaint; a reporter's own test of Bark invented a grooming scenario from a saved password. Beyond nuisance, flags can cause real harm: an 11-year-old lost a friendship after a self-harm-related message triggered an alert, and nearly a third of LGBTQ+ students surveyed said monitoring software had outed them or someone they knew, a risk Bark's own marketing chief concedes even while defending the software. Longer term, one in eight adults looking back on being monitored as kids describe lasting harm, and about one in 10 of the monitored-kid reviews said monitoring broke their trust in their parents outright. The "duty of care" alternative is not law yet. It is described only as "advancing" in the UK, Australia and some US states, not settled anywhere.

“There's so many ways for teens to get around [controls]. And at the end of the day, the biggest thing that most of these apps are telling kids is that we don't trust you.”

— Pam Wisniewski, principal research scientist, International Computer Science Institute