PSA: Parental Control Apps and Devices are Harmful to Your Child

I have a lot of thoughts about the abundance of parental control apps and devices on the market today, and my belief is that they do more harm than good.

Devices and apps that block access to certain sites and restrict times when your child can use the internet (like the Circle device) are frighteningly authoritarian. People generally don’t understand the wealth of information that these sorts of devices have access to, and companies are all too willing to abuse that access because they know parents don’t know the extent of it, and thus they can get away with it. Even worse are the plethora of these apps that take far more data than they need, and give (or sell) it to other companies that you’ve never heard of. Life360 is one such app that shares your child’s location and other sensitive data with third party companies for advertising and other purposes, but parents don’t realize this because they were too lazy to read the privacy policy, and subsequently too quick to install it on their kid’s iPhone after hearing about it from their parent-friends (if you have the Life360 app on your child’s device, I urge you to delete it immediately).

Parents get caught up on all the “benefits” of apps like this, and usually don’t realize that most of the features they enjoy most (such as screen-time management, location tracking, and age-based website filtering) have already been implemented in one way or another by Apple. I know my viewpoint is one-sided in presuming that everyone uses Apple devices, but research shows that 83% of U.S. teenagers use iPhones. And come on, if you’re buying your kid an Android phone, you clearly don’t care about their privacy anyway, so this article isn’t for you.

To be clear, I don’t just have a problem with companies violating children’s privacy; I think its bad when their parents do it too. Some people might say that because it’s their child and it’s their responsibility to care for them, that the child’s privacy is not relevant, but I emphatically disagree. Just because a person is young doesn’t mean that they don’t have a right to a certain amount of privacy, and I believe it is essential for children to have this to start exploring their own ideas and become confident in their ability to do some things independently, and this becomes far more true when we start talking about teenagers. My opinion is that you should’ve raised your child well enough that by the time you’re giving them a device with an internet browser (wether it’s an old iPad when they’re six or their first iPhone at thirteen), you trust them not to look for things that you consider inappropriate. It is one thing to try to prevent your eight year-old from stumbling across daddy’s PornHub history when they’re using the computer, but it’s another thing to be intercepting all of your fifteen year-old’s private messages. Apps that scour text messages, photos, browser history, etc. and send alerts to a parent any time something even questionably inappropriate is found go too far and violate their privacy.

Censorship and pervasive surveillance are tactics implemented by governments who are fearful that they cannot keep their citizens under control, not methods that should be utilized by any decent parent in the free world. Parents should be very cautious and do a lot of thinking before they install any sort of hardware or software with the intent of controlling or keeping tabs on their children. Furthermore, it is extremely irresponsible to use any device or app for this purpose if you haven’t legitimately read the privacy policy.

At the end of the day, I don’t think these apps and devices should be used anyway; the small benefit does not outweigh the massive risks. Plus, your kid probably understands the technology better than you do anyway, and most of these systems aren’t difficult to get around. If your son or daughter is trying to talk to someone or find something on the internet, you probably won’t impede them for very long. You can raise your kids how you want, but doing things like this puts them at more risk than simply leaving them to their own devices (no pun intended).