Child-monitoring apps might need a reboot

儿童监控应用或许需要一次“重启”

Pam Wisniewski’s digital adolescence showed her the best and the worst of the internet. At 14, she left an abusive home, where she’d been isolated in a fifth-wheel trailer at the end of a seven-mile dirt road. She moved in with her older sister and taught herself to type on AOL Instant Messenger. Online, she sought out the support and the community she’d lacked at home. She also discovered how thin the ice can be. “I sent my address to some guy in New Mexico to send me a mug with my name on it,” she recalls. “And then I found a news story like five, 10 years later that he killed somebody.”

帕姆·维斯涅夫斯基（Pam Wisniewski）的数字青春期让她见识了互联网最好与最坏的一面。14岁时，她逃离了一个充满虐待的家庭，当时她被孤立在一条七英里长土路尽头的一辆拖挂式房车里。她搬去与姐姐同住，并自学了如何在 AOL 即时通讯软件上打字。在网上，她寻求着在家里缺失的支持与社区归属感。但她也发现了网络世界如履薄冰的一面。“我曾把地址发给新墨西哥州的一个人，让他给我寄一个印有我名字的马克杯，”她回忆道，“结果五到十年后，我看到新闻说他杀人了。”

Those experiences set the course of her career. Wisniewski—now a principal research scientist at the International Computer Science Institute, a nonprofit affiliated with the University of California, Berkeley—has spent well over a decade asking what safety should look like for families navigating an evolving tech landscape, and how to achieve it without sacrificing trust. “I really see the internet as this double-edged sword,” she says.

这些经历决定了她职业生涯的方向。维斯涅夫斯基目前是国际计算机科学研究所（隶属于加州大学伯克利分校的非营利组织）的首席研究科学家。十多年来，她一直在探讨在不断演变的技术环境中，家庭的安全保障应该是什么样子的，以及如何在不牺牲信任的前提下实现这种安全。“我确实认为互联网是一把双刃剑，”她说。

Digital harms have become the defining fear of American parenthood. In the University of Michigan’s 2025 National Poll on Children’s Health, parents’ top three worries had to do with 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. From there, the dangers escalate. 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 a predator posing as a peer extracts a sexual image from a child and threatens to publish it unless paid. Chatbots are the newest danger, with companies like OpenAI facing lawsuits for allegedly coaching children toward suicide.

数字伤害已成为美国家长最核心的恐惧。在密歇根大学 2025 年的全国儿童健康民意调查中，家长最担心的三件事都与社交媒体、屏幕时间和网络安全有关。皮尤研究中心的数据显示，近一半的美国青少年表示曾在网上遭受过欺凌或骚扰。危险还不止于此：网络毒贩兜售掺有芬太尼的假药；2025 年上半年，美国国家失踪与受虐儿童中心收到了超过 23,000 起关于“金融性勒索”的报告，犯罪分子伪装成同龄人从孩子那里获取性照片，并威胁如果不给钱就将其发布。聊天机器人则是最新的威胁，OpenAI 等公司正因涉嫌诱导儿童自杀而面临诉讼。

Most parents’ first defense is conversation. In Pew surveys, more than nine in 10 say they’ve talked with their teens about what’s appropriate to share online and how to treat peers. They get an assist in limiting exposure from tools that come preinstalled on phones: Apple’s Screen Time and Google’s Family Link let parents cap screen time, block or approve apps, filter web content, and track devices. There are also apps that let family members share locations; Life360, the largest, has nearly 98 million monthly users.

大多数家长的第一道防线是沟通。皮尤调查显示，超过 90% 的家长表示曾与孩子讨论过哪些内容适合在网上分享，以及如何对待同龄人。他们还可以借助手机预装的工具来限制接触风险：苹果的“屏幕使用时间”和谷歌的“Family Link”允许家长限制屏幕时间、拦截或批准应用、过滤网页内容以及追踪设备。此外还有允许家庭成员共享位置的应用；其中规模最大的 Life360 每月拥有近 9800 万活跃用户。

But a growing number of adults are opting for tools that go further. Rather than simply restrict or locate, content-monitoring apps scan a child’s texts, photos, emails, and chats and alert parents whenever an algorithm flags something it deems dangerous. Business is booming, and the next wave of growth is already being marketed around AI, with companies positioning themselves as foils to chatbot companions and other risks. The broader market for parental control software, encompassing dozens of apps, was worth an estimated $1.57 billion in 2025 and is expected to nearly triple in value by 2034.

然而，越来越多的成年人开始选择功能更强大的工具。内容监控应用不再仅仅是限制或定位，它们会扫描孩子的短信、照片、电子邮件和聊天记录，一旦算法标记出其认为危险的内容，就会向家长发出警报。这一行业正蓬勃发展，下一波增长浪潮已围绕人工智能展开，各公司将自己定位为对抗聊天机器人伴侣及其他风险的“克星”。包括数十款应用在内的家长控制软件市场，2025 年估值约为 15.7 亿美元，预计到 2034 年其价值将增长近两倍。

Bark Technologies, the current leader among content-monitoring apps, says it scanned 11 billion messages to or from 7.5 million children in the US in 2025. Its free school program is in more than 3,700 districts, covering about one in 10 kids in the US. While Bark aims to flag only content that trips its filters, some competitors, like FlashGet Kids, include features like screen mirroring and camera access. These apps have had genuine successes: They’ve prevented suicide attempts, intercepted predators, intercepted predators, averted school shootings. But they can also cause harm themselves.

目前内容监控应用领域的领头羊 Bark Technologies 表示，2025 年其扫描了美国 750 万名儿童发送或接收的 110 亿条信息。其免费学校项目已覆盖超过 3700 个学区，覆盖了美国约十分之一的儿童。虽然 Bark 的目标仅是标记触发其过滤器的内容，但一些竞争对手（如 FlashGet Kids）还包括屏幕镜像和摄像头访问等功能。这些应用确实取得过成功：它们曾阻止过自杀企图、拦截过不法分子、预防过校园枪击事件。但它们本身也可能造成伤害。

To get a read on how digital surveillance affects young people, I scraped more than 600,000 reviews of the leading apps and talked to kids, parents, and people who were monitored as children and are now grown. Some kids were grateful for their parents’ protection. Others described false alarms that got them punished, secrets revealed before they were ready, breakdowns of trust, and anxiety they carried into adulthood. (To protect their privacy, we’re not using their full names.)

为了了解数字监控如何影响年轻人，我抓取了主流应用上的 60 多万条评论，并采访了孩子、家长以及那些在童年时期曾被监控、如今已成年的受访者。一些孩子对父母的保护心存感激；另一些人则描述了因误报而受罚、秘密在未准备好时被泄露、信任破裂以及带入成年生活的焦虑。（为保护隐私，我们未公开他们的全名。）

None of this is easily fixed. But child-safety researchers and advocates say better approaches exist. One is to make the platforms themselves safer, forcing social media companies to build guardrails instead of leaving families to find their own. This “duty of care” approach is now advancing in the UK, Australia, and a number of US states. Another is to spend less effort watching kids and more effort helping them recognize risk, cope with it, and turn to a trusted adult when something goes wrong. This approach is called resilience.

这一切并不容易解决。但儿童安全研究人员和倡导者认为，存在更好的方法。一种是让平台本身更安全，强制社交媒体公司建立护栏，而不是让家庭自己去寻找解决方案。这种“注意义务”（duty of care）方针目前正在英国、澳大利亚和美国多个州推进。另一种方法是减少对孩子的监视，转而投入更多精力帮助他们识别风险、应对风险，并在出现问题时向值得信赖的成年人求助。这种方法被称为“韧性培养”。

Wisniewski and others are developing tools that don’t aggressively monitor kids but train them in resilience and build trust with parents. “If we define safety as the absence of risk, the way you keep them safe is by keeping them off the platforms entirely,” she says. “But if we define safety as the ability to protect oneself and engage without engaging a risk, the solutions look very different.” It is the difference between abstinence lectures and sex ed.

维斯涅夫斯基等人正在开发一些工具，它们不会对孩子进行激进的监控，而是训练他们的韧性并建立与父母之间的信任。“如果我们把安全定义为‘没有风险’，那么保护他们的唯一方式就是让他们完全远离这些平台，”她说，“但如果我们把安全定义为‘保护自己并能在不陷入风险的情况下参与网络活动的能力’，那么解决方案就会大不相同。”这就像是“禁欲说教”与“性教育”之间的区别。

Content-monitoring apps typically involve two pieces of software—one on the child’s device, one on the parent’s. A parent installs the kid-side app, connects the kid’s accounts, and chooses what to surveil: messages, social apps, browsing, location, screen time. The kid-side software forwards activity to the company’s algorithmic classifiers, which scan for content related to sex, drugs, bullying, and self-harm, among other categories, and push alerts to a parent-facing dashboard. The same type of software can be loaded into school-issued accounts and devices.

内容监控应用通常包含两个软件——一个安装在孩子的设备上，另一个在家长的设备上。家长安装儿童端应用，关联孩子的账号，并选择监控内容：短信、社交应用、浏览记录、位置、屏幕时间等。儿童端软件将活动转发给公司的算法分类器，这些分类器会扫描与性、毒品、欺凌、自残等类别相关的内容，并将警报推送到家长端的仪表盘。同样类型的软件也可以安装在学校配发的账号和设备中。

Sometimes the safety net works. Titania Jordan, Bark’s chief marketing officer, told me the FBI has thanked the company on multiple occasions for bringing credible school-shooting threats to its attention. “I hate that we have to exist,” she says. “But I’m so thankful that we do.” According to Bark’s annual report, its classifiers alerted hundreds of thousands of…

有时，这张安全网确实有效。Bark 的首席营销官泰坦尼娅·乔丹（Titania Jordan）告诉我，联邦调查局（FBI）曾多次感谢该公司，因为他们及时提供了可信的校园枪击威胁线索。“我讨厌我们必须存在，”她说，“但我非常庆幸我们确实存在。”根据 Bark 的年度报告，其分类器发出了数十万次警报……