You hand your child a phone, and with it, the whole internet. The excitement on their face and the knot in your stomach. What happens now? Your child’s world is opening up to a world of unlimited information and accessibility to the other 6 billion people around the world who are also online.
As a parent, your options are limited at this point. Most parental controls ask you to make a trade. To keep your child safe, they say, you have to watch them: read their messages, track their location, log their screen activity. Safety comes in exchange for trust. Alternatively, built-in controls leave gaps that kids easily bypass, and these measures don’t work across platforms.
As parents ourselves, we reject that tradeoff. So we built something better.
Safety without surveillance
Allowed Online is a Swiss family-safety app that blocks harmful content, malware, and trackers at the network level, before they reach your child, without reading their messages or tracking their location.
How? For a start, it works at the network level to keep scams, malware, and harmful sites away from your family, and most of it is stopped before it ever loads on a device. Additionally, it hands you the controls you need to ensure family online safety. You decide how much room social media has in your child’s life, set downtime so the internet goes quiet overnight, and put a sensible limit on the apps that tend to take over our family’s lives. When you want a firmer line, you can block an app entirely, or control whether it can be installed or uninstalled at all. The thing we do that other protection measures don’t: we work across the various platforms whether your children are on their phones, tablets, or computers.
We achieve this while upholding our promise of being privacy positive. Working at the network level means we block the bad destinations and hold those limits without reading your child’s messages or watching their screens. That traffic is encrypted, and keeping it that way is the whole point. A child who’s watched doesn’t feel safe. They feel suspected.[1]
No tool catches everything, and none will replace you, the parent. Our job is to hold the boundaries in the background so your family can get on with the conversations and lessons that actually prepare kids to use the internet responsibly.
This is a start, and an invitation
For years, keeping kids safe online has meant watching them. We believe there is a better way. Family safety can protect a child and respect them at the same time, and that’s the shift we’re here to build. This is the beginning, and we have an ambitious roadmap with the goal of empowering every family.
Curious where your family stands today? Start with our free two-minute screen-time parenting style quiz. And if you are interested, join our waiting list: we are opening early access to a first group of families now, with more invitations going out in the months ahead.
Safety without surveillance. Because we know that childhood curiosity can bloom into something amazing.
Written by the team at Allowed Online. Built by parents in Switzerland.
Source
[1] Ghosh, A. K., Badillo-Urquiola, K., Guha, S., LaViola Jr., J. J., & Wisniewski, P. J. (2018). Safety vs. Surveillance: What Children Have to Say about Mobile Apps for Parental Control. Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
