Digital Safety & Privacy

Getty Images - Iana Kunitsa

Every parent of a teenager knows the feeling. There’s a moment—often when the house is quiet and your child is on their phone—when you’re left wondering: what did they see today? Who were they talking to? Are they okay? The instinct to find out is understandable—it feels protective. But a growing body of research, and a new wave of technology built on a fundamentally different premise, suggests that surveillance is not the answer we think it is.

The numbers tell a sobering story. According to the Family Online Safety Institute’s 2025 Online Safety Survey, large majorities of U.S. parents worry about predatory behavior online, age-inappropriate content, and their child giving away personal information. These are not fringe anxieties—they are the defining fears of modern parenthood.

And yet, despite this widespread concern, most parents are not using the tools available to them. The same survey found that parental controls are adopted by only 51% of parents for tablets, 47% for smartphones, and just 35% for gaming consoles. Among those who have tried existing tools, roughly two-thirds report being dissatisfied. The gap between worry and action reveals something important: parents are not indifferent—they are overwhelmed.

The Privacy Paradox — For Parents and Their Kids

This tension between concern and action runs through the broader American relationship with digital privacy. According to a recent survey from my company, Prosper Insights & Analytics, 64% of US Adults dislike advertisers using their personal data to target ads.

At the same time an equal share want legislation to prevent it.

Yet only 28% have changed their social media privacy settings. More striking still, 25.7% have taken no steps at all.

This dynamic shows up even more sharply inside families. Parents who feel uncertain about their own digital privacy are poorly positioned to guide their children through the same terrain. The same Prosper survey found that 48% of adults worry about location tracking on smartphones, and 56% fear unauthorized access to personal information—precisely the concerns now relevant for a 13-year-old with a TikTok account.

The Conversation Gap

It turns out parents are already reaching for the right tool—they just don’t have enough support to use it well. According to a 2024 National Parent Teacher Association survey, the number one way parents manage their child’s online activity is simply talking to them about it—cited by 65% of parents, more than twice the share who use mobile parental control tools.

Here is the finding that should reshape how we think about this problem. According to FOSI’s 2025 research, in households that report six or more conversations about online safety per year, both parents and children are more likely to say that parental controls succeed. The tool is not enough on its own—the conversation is what activates it.

This is not a small effect. It points to something fundamental about how digital safety is actually built—not through restriction alone, but through understanding. Adolescents who feel they can talk openly with their parents make better decisions, including online.

Children appear ready for this openness. The FOSI survey found that 89% of children aged 10 to 17 say they feel comfortable turning to a parent if something online makes them feel unsafe. That represents an enormous, underutilized resource—one that most tools, designed around restriction rather than relationship, never reach.

That trust, however, is fragile. Research from the Digital Wellness Lab shows that teens exposed to surveillance software without their knowledge often react negatively—and may be less likely to seek help when something goes wrong. Heavy-handed restrictions can push kids toward workarounds.

Coaching, Not Surveillance

It is in this context that a new category of family digital safety technology is beginning to emerge—one built around coaching rather than monitoring.

First, some background. My company, Prosper Insights & Analytics, has provided an academic data grant to Northwestern University Medill Integrated Marketing Communications program for more than 23 years. This collaboration has helped drive breakthrough research on the influence of digital media and neuroscience—how the human brain processes information and makes decisions. Over the past two decades, the work has been published in more than 25 peer-reviewed academic papers, presented at leading industry conferences, and has served as the foundation for books by Martin Block, Frank Mulhern, and the late Don Schultz.

According to a recent IMC graduate and founder of the new family coaching platform WolfLock, Gideon Brewer says, “Nearly 90% of parents we surveyed understand the risks, but more than 80% have never meaningfully reviewed their child’s app permissions. That gap between concern and action is the real problem. Most tools assume a parent’s job is to watch what their child does. We’re building on a different premise: the job is to prepare them to make good decisions on their own.”

WolfLock, currently in development, takes privacy-safe, device-level signals available through Apple’s iOS—app usage patterns, screen time data, new app installs, and age-rating mismatches—and transforms them into structured coaching conversations for parents and children. It does not read messages, browsing history, or private content.

Rather than alerting a parent that their teenager visited a particular website, it surfaces a prompt such as: “TikTok is rated 17+ and Emma is 13. Here’s what TikTok collects—and here’s how to talk about what she’s encountering and what boundaries make sense for your family.”

The approach draws on behavioral science principles similar to motivational interviewing and family-based therapy: change is more durable when it is internally motivated, collaboratively developed, and reinforced. Restriction without understanding produces workarounds. Understanding, built through conversation, produces judgment.

Apple’s Role — And Its Limits

The release of iOS 26 this fall will bring meaningful new protections: more detailed age ratings, expanded safety settings for under-18 accounts, and new ways for apps to adapt experiences by age without collecting exact birthdates. These are genuine improvements and will reduce baseline risk for many families.

But they will not solve the conversation problem. Apple is building better locks—but better locks don’t eliminate uncertainty. They just move it. The question of what to say when behavior changes—and how to start that conversation in a way that builds trust—remains outside the scope of any operating system. According to Brewer, “Apple gives families the locks. What we’re building helps them decide when to use them—and what to say when it matters.”

What Parents Can Do Right Now

The research points toward a practical path forward. Start the conversation before there is a crisis. Children who talk openly with parents about digital life are more likely to come forward when something goes wrong.

Review privacy settings together, not for them. When a parent unilaterally locks down a phone, it often produces resentment. When a parent and teenager review settings side by side, it produces something more valuable: understanding.

Finally, pay attention to the apps, not just the time. Two hours on TikTok is not the same as two hours on a homework platform. The signal is in the specifics.

This is where a structured coaching layer becomes essential—not as a replacement for parental judgment, but as guidance on where to start. A well-designed system surfaces the right conversation at the right time, based on what is actually happening on a child’s device.

The digital world is not going away. The teenagers navigating it today are forming habits, judgment, and relationships that will shape the rest of their lives. The parents who navigate this well won’t be the ones who monitored the most. They’ll be the ones who built trust—and gave their kids the ability to make good decisions.

Disclosure: The consumer sentiment study referenced above was conducted by my company, Prosper Insights & Analytics. This is the same dataset used by the National Retail Federation, and available from Amazon Web Services, Bloomberg, and the London Stock Exchange Group for economic benchmarking.