How to Keep Your Children Safe Online

Why I Decided to Write This Post

In recent years, ensuring online child safety has become increasingly complex as new platforms keep on coming up.

And although the information is out there, I wanted to give parents more information about the platforms that their children are hanging out in as well, because none of those platforms really mean to be harmful, but some of them really are not trying their best to protect children's well-being.

I must also point out, your children must want to cooperate with you. There really isn't any other choice since your children will often be more tech literate than you, but may lack the life experience necessary to sense danger, especially online where it is easier to mask real intentions. The younger the children, easier it will be to educate them about the dangers that they may face online.

So the best way of protecting your children online is educating them about the dangers of being online, and the best way to do that is to educate yourself about the dangers they may face, and the platforms they use.

Popular Apps and Online Child Safety Risks

To get the best understanding of the most probable threats, it is best to first identify what platforms your children are active on. We will go through ways you can do this now, including if your children are trying to hide what platforms they are using from you.

If your children are actively trying to hide apps and platforms they are using from you, then the way of finding what they use becomes slightly harder but I will try to cover those as much as I can as well.

Looking Through Their Applications

Being the obvious solution, you can ask your children to unlock their devices to be able to see the applications they are using. This is going to be very effective for most children, although make sure to not be invasive, they might want to hide their chats for any reason, that by itself doesn't immediately signal danger. Keep the names of those apps in your mind, we will identify some of them here and tell you the typical threats children face in those specific platforms. Unfortunately I can not cover all of the possible applications your children may be using, but I tried to put the ones that I perceive as the most dangerous here. If you have any questions about a specific application you can ask about it in any of our socials.

Logging in to Their E-Mail

Children barely use their email for chatting purposes, they barely use it for anything other than school and sign ups. They won't be over-protective of their emails (there may be exceptions to that) and rarely bother clearing their emails. They might have multiple email addresses, many do. So checking the ones they are logged in to on their phone or any other device might not suffice, however it is a very good starting point as well so must probably not be skipped. Each child is different so you must mostly figure out a non threatening way of accessing their emails, they might be logged in on your family computer, or theirs. You may even know the password to it.

Just access their inbox and search for terms such as "activation" (for account activations), "welcome" (for first sign ups), "detected" (new device/login alerts from platforms with 2 factor authentication). Take a look around those emails and look for platforms such as discord.com, snapchat.com, and so on. Do this for every email they have logged in to.

Finding Hidden Applications

Children are resourceful, and both iOS and Android offer built-in ways to hide applications from the main home screen. If an app is hidden, it won’t appear when you simply swipe through their phone.

On iOS (iPhones and iPads)

Apps can be removed from the Home Screen but remain in the "App Library." To check this, swipe all the way to the right on the home screen and search the App Library. Additionally, check the "Purchased" history in the App Store by tapping their profile picture. Even if an app is deleted from the device, it will show up here (unless manually hidden from the purchase history, which is possible but less common).

On Android

Many Android devices, especially Samsungs, have features like the "Secure Folder" or "Hidden Apps" in the display settings. These often require a PIN or password. You can also go to Settings > Apps > See all apps, which will display every application installed on the device, regardless of whether it is hidden from the app drawer.

Vault Apps

Be aware of "Vault" or "Decoy" apps. These often look like standard calculators or utility apps but require a specific passcode typed into the keypad to unlock a secret folder containing hidden photos, videos, or other apps.

Checking Screen Time and Battery Usage

If you cannot find the apps themselves, the phone's internal logs will not lie about where the device's battery and time are going.

iOS

Go to Settings > Screen Time or Settings > Battery. The battery menu will show you exactly which apps have consumed the most power over the last 24 hours or 10 days. If you see an app taking up 30% of the battery but you can't find it on the home screen, you know it is hidden.

Android

Go to Settings > Digital Wellbeing or Settings > Battery > Battery usage. This provides a similar breakdown of screen time and background usage per app.

Threats on Online Platforms for Your Child's Safety

Once you know what platforms your children are using, you need to understand the specific risks associated with them. Here is a breakdown of the typical threat surfaces for the most common apps that have the most perceived threats.

Discord: Chatting App

Discord is built around "servers" (communities) and direct messaging. While excellent for gaming with real-life friends, the risks arise in public servers. It has over 200 million active users, the app itself is not supposed to be dangerous, however it has been source of great controversy.

• Why Your Child Might Be Using It: Even Impake has a discord server, there is a server for about anything. There are game development servers, there are servers for learning foreign languages, there are servers for finding people to play with for a specific game that your child might be playing. There are plenty of servers and some are official servers of companies and moderated by paid moderators (although this is very rare, and does not prevent the dangers entirely).

• The Threat: Unmoderated content and grooming. Because anyone can create a server, rules and moderation vary wildly. Predators often use public gaming servers to find children, build trust over shared interests, and then move them to private direct messages or servers that they have created. The servers are found from the official discord discovery page; or other platforms (mostly other platforms) that are not affiliated with discord such as top.gg, disboard.org, and many other listing platforms (they provide links to servers that are on discord, you can think of them like a phonebook for discord servers.)

There is a youtube channel that often explains different and recent threats on Discord, it is called NoTextToSpeech on YouTube. Here is a video of him explaining one of the dangerous groups that existed on Discord in detail.

Snapchat: Chatting App

Snapchat is defined by its disappearing messages and photo-sharing features. It is primarily used by children and young adults.

• Why Your Child Might Be Using It: The primary use of snapchat is to chat with your friends, it is quite simple and the "snap score" and "snap streaks" mechanic of sending daily pictures between friends is what makes it addicting to many children, seeing their snap streak number per friend go up keeps them coming back, missing a day makes that number drop to 0 unless recovered with other mechanics or paying real life money.

• The Threat: Sextortion, cyberbullying, and location tracking. Because messages disappear, children often feel a false sense of security, leading to sharing inappropriate images. Predators use this platform heavily for sextortion (blackmailing children with compromised photos). Additionally, the "Snap Map" broadcasts the user's exact pinpoint location to their friends list after given permission. Predators are able to contact children very easily since there is a discovery page where pseudo-random accounts are shown and are able to be added as friends, and when your children does confirm the friend request they are now able to chat with that stranger, possibly a predator.

• Mitigation: Turn off Snap Map (set to "Ghost Mode"). Have a serious conversation about how "disappearing" media can still be screenshotted or recorded by a second device without snapchat even warning about it.

Roblox: Games & Social

Roblox is less of a single game and more of a game-creation platform, boasting millions of user-generated worlds.

• The Threat: In-game chatting and financial scams. The platform's blocky aesthetic makes it seem entirely child-friendly, but the chat filters can sometimes be bypassed. Predators use the chat to move children to unmonitored platforms like Discord. There is also a heavy risk of "Robux" (in-game currency, often bought with real money) scams.

• Mitigation: Roblox has robust parental controls. You can restrict gameplay to curated, age-appropriate games and disable the in-game chat feature entirely based on the child's age. You can find out more about it in the Roblox's parental controls article.

TikTok and Instagram (Short-form Video)

While primarily for consuming content, the direct messaging features are highly active. To give Meta credit, they have a great resource hub for parents to know how keep children safe online, please take a look at their Family Center and read the articles there. Some of the articles are written by organizations like UNICEF.

• The Threat: Algorithmic rabbit holes and inappropriate contact. The algorithm can quickly funnel children into damaging content (e.g., extreme dieting, self-harm, or radicalization) based on watch time, concerningly, the algorithms can also funnel the predators into content created by children. Public profiles can receive messages from strangers, and predators can go unnoticed and are able to contact children on the platform using private messages.

• Mitigation: Set accounts to private. Utilize "Family Center" or similar parental supervision tools offered by Meta and TikTok, which allow you to see who they are following and who is messaging them, as well as set daily time limits.

Moving Forward: Communication Over Confiscation

If you discover your child is using a platform you are uncomfortable with, or if you find inappropriate content, resist the urge to immediately confiscate the device. Doing so will only teach them to hide their tracks better next time.

Instead, approach the situation with curiosity. Ask them what they enjoy about the app, who they talk to, and if anything has ever made them uncomfortable. Establishing an open dialogue is the only long-term strategy that works. Your goal is to be the person they run to when something goes wrong online, rather than the person they hide from.

What can you teach your children?

And now the most important step after all of these, you should teach your children what you now know. How can they make it so they are the least vulnerable to dangers online? And what may happen if anything goes wrong? Here are the things you can start teaching.

To Assume a Fake Identity Online

You can tell them to decide on a fake name and a fake surname online and use that, a fake birthday and a fake place they are living in. They should always prefer not to share any personally identifiable information, teach them that too. But if they will share any information, such as in sign ups and so on, they should use the fake information. Make sure that they use a fake birth date in their real age bracket while signing up to platforms, because most platforms automatically apply child protecting features according to the entered birth date. It is quite common practice among children to automatically select a birthday that is over 18, so most of their accounts are probably already over 18.

These will make it significantly harder for predators and other threats to find where your children live, or threaten them with sharing their personally identifying information with other threat actors (called doxing).

In addition, you should teach your children to not share any pictures of themselves or pictures from places that they live around, since some relatively advanced threat actors can find the location of where the photo was taken from even if the EXIF data was cleared from the picture (which most of these platforms have began doing in private messages). And if the EXIF data was not cleared, it is as easy as checking the properties of an image on an image viewer and you will see the precise location of where it was taken from.

Some things the threat actors might do after getting your child's identity:

• Find their real life friends' social medias and figure out their place of education. Send anonymous reports such as "[your child] has [something illegal] in their backpack." and give your child a hard time in school.

• Swatting (sending swat teams with false claims like above to your house and endanger everyone living inside), this is a commonly occurring incident, some ending with deaths. Check out this news article explaining how 3 teens were responsible with 30 similar incidents across the US.

• In the case of your children sharing photos of themselves, the threat actors may use those pictures in deepfakes to threaten your children and use it as a sextortion method, despite your children not having shared anything explicit.

• In another case of your children sharing photos from, lets say, their school ground; a location dependent information might slip in, such as a competition happening nearby or some area specfic number, or part of the school's name, and it could be used to figure out more information about your children.

• Child abduction, trafficking and more.

Never to Download Anything From Untrusted Resources

"Untrusted resources" is a very broad term, matter of fact the so called "trusted resources" are also used to distribute malware from time to time, but they are way less risky in general.

Teach them that the "untrusted sources" include their friends that they have known for a long time. Some more advanced threats may take over their friends' accounts and use the language that they normally use to convince them into downloading a program. There has been cases of this on discord where compromised accounts were used to make those accounts' friends download a program where "they could watch movies together", which was a malware and used to steal cryptocurrency and more from their victims.

Most common things the children download and get hacked by can be listed as pirated games and game cheats.

Pirated games, which are games that are downloaded from unofficial distribution channels. For games, make sure your children are using platforms such as Steam, Epic Games, and other commonly used and known ones.

If you are unsure of the platform's legitimacy, do a quick web search and see how long they have existed for, how known they are and their coverage by other websites.

Mind you, the games/applications being downloaded from these platforms doesn't immediately mark them as safe. Steam being one of the most trusted platforms out there (and the one I prefer to use), has still had instances of malware being distributed from it which does get taken down very quickly after it is noticed.

Game cheats. There has been plenty of instances where free and paid game cheats were distributed with malware, some as ransomware used to ransom those who have downloaded it for thousands of dollars to unlock their files, some stealing the banking, login, and pretty much anything valuable in your computer (which may include your social security number etc.) and selling them in the dark web or using them for fraud.

Some of the malware even get distributed by other children, as part of legitimate software that functions normally. After they get access to your children's computer the threat actors will try to get all the information they can to threaten and try to get anything they want out of your children.

Teach them to never disable their antivirus, and that if they notice anything unusal happening in their computer report it back to you (such as the computer slowing down out of the blue, glitches happening randomly which normally does not happen, the camera light turning on while not in use and the computer heating/fan noise increasing up a lot more than usual while seemingly not doing anything).

They Can Always Talk About Their Problems With You

If despite all of this, anything was to happen, teach them that coming back to you is the safest option. Often those extorting your children will make them scared of contacting anyone about what is happening to them. Tell them that if anything is to happen, talk to you about the situation so you can contact the appropriate institutions.

If they are scared of talking to you, your children will not be able to defend themselves at their young age alone. Because being scared of talking to you also means being scared of talking to the police, since you will know whatever they hid at the end anyway.

Make them trust you and know that you would much prefer they come to you than hide their problems, and make sure they won't feel discouraged to do so, and not be embarrassed about the mistake they did. Nothing should prevent them from asking help from you.

What about Adult Content?

It is both harder and easier to take care of than the other threats. Easier because with a few setting configurations and a phone call you can prevent them from accessing the known adult content platforms online accidentally. Harder because if your children do want to access them they will find a way.

Best you can do is prevent accidental exposure to such platforms at a young age, which you can do easily.

Device-Level Restrictions

Both major mobile operating systems have built-in tools to limit access to explicit websites. These act as the first line of defense.

On iOS (iPhones and iPads)

Apple handles this through the Screen Time feature. Go to Settings > Screen Time > Content & Privacy Restrictions. Under the "Web Content" section, you can select "Limit Adult Websites." This automatically filters out known adult domains in Safari and most in-app browsers. To prevent your child from reverting this setting, ensure you lock Screen Time with a passcode that they do not know.

On Android

Google's Family Link application allows you to manage your child's device remotely. Once set up, you can navigate to the controls for Google Chrome and select "Try to block explicit sites." It relies on Google's SafeSearch technology to filter out inappropriate search results and web pages.

Network-Level DNS Filtering

If you want to protect every device connected to your home Wi-Fi (including smart TVs, gaming consoles, and personal computers) you can change your router's DNS (Domain Name System) settings. Think of DNS as the internet's phonebook; a filtered DNS simply removes the addresses for adult websites.

Certain DNS providers offer free/paid DNS IPs specifically designed for families. By logging into your home router's administrator panel and replacing the default DNS with a family-filtered DNS, any device on that Wi-Fi network will be blocked from loading adult content. This method will also force search engines like Google, Bing, and YouTube into SafeSearch or restricted modes automatically.

You can learn more about configuring family filtered DNS in this forum post.

ISP-Level Blocks

Many Internet Service Providers (ISPs) offer network-level filtering for residential networks.

Contact your internet provider and ask if they offer parental controls or family-safe browsing filters at the account level. Often, this is a free toggle they can activate on their end, preventing explicit content from reaching your modem entirely.

You can do the same thing for your children's mobile plans. It works the same way, so it will continue working even if they switch to mobile data. If their age is known by their service provider, they might have family friendly filter enabled by default.

Parental Controls

Very few families use parental controls properly. Device wide parental controls are often not enough at all. Most of the time, the platforms your children use all have individual parental controls. Since most children after a certain age will oppose the idea of having parental controls, please have a chat with them about it in a convincing way to not push them into hiding everything from you, or make some compromises. For example in discord, parents can't see their children's messages but can see the names of servers they are in or names of people they are chatting with.

For every platform, do a quick web search like: "[platform name] parental controls" or "[platform name] parents guide" to get the best guide for each platform. If you feel like one platform is performing poorly at protecting your children, try to convince your children to moving to a similar platform with better protections for them. But remember, pushing too hard will push your kid to hide everything they do and lose trust in you or feel resentment.

Before We Finish

Best of luck to parents out there. I acknowledge that raising kids is hard, and protecting them in the vast majority of the internet is especially demanding. Remember, your children's safety depends on their knowledge about the threats around them. By reading posts like this and doing your research, you are doing better at protecting your children online than most parents out there.

If you would like to find more resources like this one, you can continue your reading on Meta's family center. Although I don't think it is obvious in their applications that they care about children's safety, they still provide good resources for parents on how to protect their children online.

Thank you for putting in the effort, your child will appreciate it in the future.

If you have any recommendations for us to add, or any questions you have, you can contact us from any of our socials.