Author: Jesselyn Cook / Source: HuffPost
Bark, a firm that sells parental smartphone-monitoring software, claims to have scanned more than a billion messages from 2 million children since it launched in 2016. The app, which monitors kids’ devices for dangers like cyberbullying or communication with predators, has helped prevent dozens of potential suicides as well as school shootings and bomb threats, the firm claims.
But the technology also raises privacy worries, especially when used covertly, skeptics say.
“Obviously there are privacy concerns when it comes to installing these kinds of applications on children’s phones, especially if they don’t know about it,” said Jasmina Byrne, a child protection specialist at UNICEF and expert in children’s privacy rights in the digital age.
Here’s how it works: For $9 per month, parents can connect Bark with their kids’ smartphones and other devices to surveil their texts and emails as well as their social media posts and private messages, including photos and videos. Bark, which is compatible with 24 different platforms, alerts parents if its algorithms detect that the child or the person they’re communicating with is using profanity, sexting, being bullied or showing signs of depression. The algorithms are also designed to detect threats of violence in addition to discussions of self-harm, suicidal thoughts or drug use, among other things.
Bark encourages parents to let their kids know they’ve installed the company’s software. But in some cases it’s “possible” for parents to install it without their kids’ knowledge, said Brandon Hilkert, the firm’s chief technology officer.
Kids will figure out pretty quickly that they’re being monitored, Hilkert argued. “It becomes very obvious [to the child] that they’re being monitored when the parent gets the first issue and goes straight to the kid and says, ‘What’s this about?’”The app doesn’t give parents blanket access to all of their children’s communications. Instead, they receive “snippets” of flagged content paired with recommendations from child psychologists on how best to react. These snippets can include messages sent to their children by other kids, who may not be aware that Bark is monitoring the conversation and disseminating flagged portions from both parties.
“We really only want to alert parents when there’s a problem or issue that they need to know about,” Chief Marketing Officer Titania Jordan told HuffPost. “We are definitely not a company that advocates spying or giving parents full, unfettered access to all of their children’s devices and accounts.”
Bark’s content review team, however, has access to all monitored communications, including children’s photos and videos that might contain nudity. They erase this content from their system after reporting it to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, as required by law. The app also alerts parents but does not share the visual media with them.
Bark is among an expanding pool of parental control software that offers child monitoring and tracking services. (It’s designed to…
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