The parental monitoring industry is having a moment. Bark Technologies scanned 11 billion messages to or from 7.5 million American kids last year, and its school program now reaches one in 10 US students. The broader parental-control software market hit $1.57 billion in 2025 and is projected to nearly triple within a decade. Parents are terrified—and companies are cashing in on that fear with apps that scan texts, photos, and chats, flagging anything an algorithm deems risky. Some even offer screen mirroring and camera access.
But the kids on the receiving end tell a messier story. MIT Technology Review scraped over 600,000 app reviews and interviewed people who grew up under digital surveillance. Some were grateful. Others described false alarms that triggered punishment, secrets exposed before they were ready, and trust with their parents shattered. The anxiety, several said, followed them into adulthood. Pam Wisniewski, a principal research scientist at the International Computer Science Institute, knows both sides intimately. She found community online as a traumatized teen—and also gave her address to a stranger who later turned out to be a killer. “I really see the internet as this double-edged sword,” she says.
The apps do have real wins: intercepted predators, prevented suicide attempts, averted school shootings. That’s not nothing. But researchers like Wisniewski argue the entire framing is off. Defining safety as the absence of risk leads inevitably to surveillance, and surveillance teaches kids to hide rather than to cope. The alternative gaining traction—in the UK, Australia, and several US states—is a duty-of-care model that forces platforms to build guardrails instead of leaving families to fend for themselves. Think of it as the difference between putting a lock on every cabinet and teaching a kid which bottles are poison.
What’s striking is how little evidence supports the surveillance approach. The apps flag content, but false positives create their own damage—punishing kids for jokes, slang, or private thoughts that algorithms misread. Meanwhile, resilience-focused tools Wisniewski and her colleagues are building aim to train kids to recognize risk and turn to a trusted adult when things go wrong. That’s a harder sell to anxious parents than a dashboard of alerts. But it may be the only approach that doesn’t trade a child’s sense of safety for a parent’s peace of mind.
