미국 부모들의 최대 우려는 소셜미디어와 인터넷 안전 문제로, 이에 따라 아이의 문자·사진·채팅을 AI로 검열해 부모에게 경고하는 콘텐츠 모니터링 앱 시장이 급성장하고 있다. 이러한 앱들은 자살 시도 예방, 범죄자 검거 등 실제 성과를 냈지만, 오탐으로 인한 처벌, 신뢰 붕괴, 성인기까지 이어지는 불안 등 부작용도 초래하고 있어 균형 잡힌 설계가 요구된다.
번역된 본문
팸 위스니프스키(Pam Wisniewski)의 디지털 사춘기는 인터넷의 최고 순간과 최악의 순간을 모두 보여주었다. 14세那年 그녀는 학대하는 가정을 떠났다. 그곳에서 그녀는 11킬로미터(7마일)짜리 비포장도로 끝의 5륜 트레일러 안에 갇힌 채 고립되어 지냈다. 언니 집으로 옮겨간 그녀는 AOL 인스턴트 메신저에서 스스로 타이핑을 배웠다. 온라인에서 그녀는 집에서 얻지 못했던 지지와 공동체를 찾았다. 동시에 그 얼음이 얼마나 얇은지도 깨달았다. "제 이름이 새겨진 머그컵을 보내준다던 뉴멕시코의 어떤 남자에게 주소를 보냈어요"라고 그녀는 회상한다. "그리고 5년, 10년 후에 그가 누군가를 살해했다는 뉴스를 발견했죠." 이러한 경험들이 그녀의 career 방향을 정했다. 현재 캘리포니아대학교 버클리캠퍼스 산하 비영리단체인 국제컴퓨터과학연구소(ICSI)의 수석 연구과학자인 위스니프스키는 진화하는 기술 환경을 헤쳐나가는 가족에게 안전이란 무엇이어야 하고, 신뢰를 희생하지 않으면서 어떻게 달성할 수 있는지를 10년 넘게 연구해왔다. "저는 인터넷이 양날의 검이라고 정말 생각한다"고 그녀는 말한다.
디지털 피해는 미국 부모들에게 가장 큰 두려움이 되었다. 미시간대학교의 2025년 전국 아동 건강 조사에서 부모들의 상위 3개 우려는 소셜미디어, 스크린 타임, 인터넷 안전과 관련된 것이었다. 퓨리서치센터에 따르면 미국 10대 거의 절반이 온라인에서 괴롭힘이나 괴롭힘을 당했다고 답했다. 여기서 위험은 더 심각해진다. 온라인 마약 판매자들은 펜타닐이 섞인 가짜 알약을 판다. 2025년 상반기에 실종·착취아동국립센터(NCMEC)는 2만 3천 건이 넘는 금전적 성착취(financial sextortion) 신고를 처리했다. 이는 가해자가 또래인 척하며 아이에게 성적인 이미지를 받아낸 뒤 돈을 지불하지 않으면 공개하겠다고 협박하는 범죄다. 챗봇은 최신 위험으로, OpenAI 같은 기업들은 아이들에게 자살을 부추겼다는 혐의로 소송을 faced하고 있다.
대부분의 부모들의 첫 번째 방어수단은 대화다. 퓨 리서치 조사에서 10명 중 9명 이상이 온라인에서 무엇을 공유해야 하는지, 또래를 어떻게 대하는지에 대해 10대 자녀와 대화했다고 답했다. 휴대폰에 기본 탑재된 도구들도 노출 제한에 도움을 준다. Apple의 스크린 타임(Screen Time)과 Google의 패밀리 링크(Family Link)는 부모가 스크린 타임을 제한하고, 앱을 차단하거나 승인하며, 웹 콘텐츠를 필터링하고, 기기를 추적할 수 있게 한다. 가족 간 위치를 공유하는 앱도 있다. 가장 큰 규모인 Life360은 월간 약 9,800만 명의 사용자를 보유하고 있다.
하지만 점점 더 많은 어른들이 한 걸음 더 나아간 도구를 선택하고 있다. 단순히 제한하거나 위치를 확인하는 것이 아니라, 콘텐츠 모니터링 앱은 아이의 문자, 사진, 이메일, 채팅을 검사하고 알고리즘이 위험하다고 판단한 내용을 발견하면 부모에게 경고를 보낸다. 사업이 호황을 누리고 있으며, 다음 성장 동력은 이미 AI를 중심으로 마케팅되고 있다. 기업들은 자사를 챗봇 컴패니언 등 각종 위험의 해결사로 포지셔닝하고 있다. 수십 개 앱을 포괄하는 부모 통제 소프트웨어 시장은 2025년 기준 약 15억 7천만 달러 규모로 추산되며, 2034년까지 그 가치가 거의 3배로 성장할 것으로 예상된다.
콘텐츠 모니터링 앱 분야의 현재 선두주자인 바크 테크놀로지스(Bark Technologies)는 2025년 미국 내 750만 명의 아동과 주고받은 110억 건의 메시지를 검사했다고 밝혔다. 무료 학교 프로그램은 3,700개 이상의 교육구에서 운영되며, 미국 아동 약 10분의 1을 커버한다. 바크는 필터에 걸리는 콘텐츠만 플래그하는 것을 목표로 하지만, 플래시겟 키즈(FlashGet Kids) 같은 일부 경쟁사는 화면 미러링과 카메라 접근 같은 기능을 포함하고 있다.
이러한 앱들은 실제 성과를 거두어 왔다. 자살 시도를 막고, 범죄자를 검거했으며, 학교 총기 난사를 예방했다. 하지만 이 앱들 자체도 해를 끼칠 수 있다. 디지털 감시가 청소년에게 미치는 영향을 파악하기 위해 나는 주요 앱들의 리뷰 60만 건 이상을 수집·분석하고, 아이들, 부모들, 그리고 어릴 때 감시당했고 지금은 성인이 된 사람들을 인터뷰했다. 일부 아이들은 부모의 보호에 감사해했다. 반면 다른 이들은 오탐으로 벌을 받았던 일, 준비되지 않은 시점에 폭로된 비밀, 신뢰의 붕괴, 그리고 성인기까지 짊어지게 된 불안을 이야기했다.
Pam Wisniewski’s digital adolescence showed her the best and the worst of the internet. At 14, she left an abusive home, where she’d been isolated in a fifth-wheel trailer at the end of a seven-mile dirt road. She moved in with her older sister and taught herself to type on AOL Instant Messenger. Online, she sought out the support and the community she’d lacked at home. She also discovered how thin the ice can be. “I sent my address to some guy in New Mexico to send me a mug with my name on it,” she recalls. “And then I found a news story like five, 10 years later that he killed somebody.” Those experiences set the course of her career. Wisniewski—now a principal research scientist at the International Computer Science Institute, a nonprofit affiliated with the University of California, Berkeley—has spent well over a decade asking what safety should look like for families navigating an evolving tech landscape, and how to achieve it without sacrificing trust. “I really see the internet as this double-edged sword,” she says. Digital harms have become the defining fear of American parenthood. In the University of Michigan’s 2025 National Poll on Children’s Health , parents’ top three worries had to do with social media, screen time, and internet safety. Nearly half of American teenagers say they have been bullied or harassed online, according to the Pew Research Center . From there, the dangers escalate. Online drug dealers sell counterfeit pills laced with fentanyl. In the first half of 2025, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children fielded more than 23,000 reports of financial sextortion, in which a predator posing as a peer extracts a sexual image from a child and threatens to publish it unless paid. Chatbots are the newest danger, with companies like OpenAI facing lawsuits for allegedly coaching children toward suicide. Most parents’ first defense is conversation. In Pew surveys , more than nine in 10 say they’ve talked with their teens about what’s appropriate to share online and how to treat peers. They get an assist in limiting exposure from tools that come preinstalled on phones: Apple’s Screen Time and Google’s Family Link let parents cap screen time, block or approve apps, filter web content, and track devices. There are also apps that let family members share locations; Life360, the largest, has nearly 98 million monthly users. But a growing number of adults are opting for tools that go further. Rather than simply restrict or locate, content-monitoring apps scan a child’s texts, photos, emails, and chats and alert parents whenever an algorithm flags something it deems dangerous. Business is booming, and the next wave of growth is already being marketed around AI, with companies positioning themselves as foils to chatbot companions and other risks. The broader market for parental control software, encompassing dozens of apps, was worth an estimated $1.57 billion in 2025 and is expected to nearly triple in value by 2034. Bark Technologies, the current leader among content-monitoring apps, says it scanned 11 billion messages to or from 7.5 million children in the US in 2025. Its free school program is in more than 3,700 districts, covering about one in 10 kids in the US. While Bark aims to flag only content that trips its filters, some competitors, like FlashGet Kids, include features like screen mirroring and camera access. These apps have had genuine successes: They’ve prevented suicide attempts, intercepted predators, averted school shootings. But they can also cause harm themselves. To get a read on how digital surveillance affects young people, I scraped more than 600,000 reviews of the leading apps and talked to kids, parents, and people who were monitored as children and are now grown. Some kids were grateful for their parents’ protection. Others described false alarms that got them punished, secrets revealed before they were ready, breakdowns of trust, and anxiety they carried into adulthood. (To protect their privacy, we’re not using their full names.) None of this is easily fixed. But child-safety researchers and advocates say better approaches exist. One is to make the platforms themselves safer, forcing social media companies to build guardrails instead of leaving families to find their own. This “duty of care” approach is now advancing in the UK, Australia, and a number of US states. Another is to spend less effort watching kids and more effort helping them recognize risk, cope with it, and turn to a trusted adult when something goes wrong. This approach is called resilience. Wisniewski and others are developing tools that don’t aggressively monitor kids but train them in resilience and build trust with parents. “If we define safety as the absence of risk, the way you keep them safe is by keeping them off the platforms entirely,” she says. “But if we define safety as the ability to protect oneself and engage without engaging a risk, the solutions look very different.” It is the difference between abstinence lectures and sex ed. Content-monitoring apps typically involve two pieces of software—one on the child’s device, one on the parent’s. A parent installs the kid-side app, connects the kid’s accounts, and chooses what to surveil: messages, social apps, browsing, location, screen time. The kid-side software forwards activity to the company’s algorithmic classifiers, which scan for content related to sex, drugs, bullying, and self-harm, among other categories, and push alerts to a parent-facing dashboard. The same type of software can be loaded into school-issued accounts and devices. Sometimes the safety net works. Titania Jordan, Bark’s chief marketing officer, told me the FBI has thanked the company on multiple occasions for bringing credible school-shooting threats to its attention. “I hate that we have to exist,” she says. “But I’m so thankful that we do.” According to Bark’s annual report, its classifiers alerted hundreds of thousands of families to severe self-harm risks in 2025. Gaggle, a school-monitoring competitor, makes a similar claim in its own annual report , crediting its software with saving over 1,000 lives in the 2024–’25 school year. Nearly one in five kids noted feeling watched or stripped of privacy. About one in 10 said monitoring broke their trust in their parents; one in 12 described anxiety or distress. Real-world efficacy across the market is harder to measure, though there are hundreds of anecdotes in the reviews—predominantly about how location-sharing apps like Life360 have helped parents find lost kids. Dozens of reviewers also praise content-monitoring apps for averting major crises like potential suicide or self-harm. Of the reviews I scraped (reviews, it’s worth noting, represent a self-selected sample that’s skewed toward strong feelings), over 200,000 had some indication of whether they were written by a parent or a kid. Parents liked whatever worked. On average, screen-time limiters and location trackers drew four- or five-star reviews 74% to 78% of the time. OS-level controls and content-scanning apps fared worse (44% and 48% positive reviews, respectively), with parents’ top grievance being that the apps were unreliable: They disconnected, missed genuinely troubling content, and raised alarms over nothing. The kids being watched had different concerns. Of the reviews I could attribute to either a parent or a kid, about 14,000 came from kids being monitored now or from adults looking back at being monitored in their youth. Roughly one in seven were, on balance, grateful. (Gavin, a teen I messaged with, said that monitoring “taught me self-accountability and integrity.”) But nearly one in five noted feeling watched or stripped of privacy. About one in 10 said it broke their trust in their parents; one in 12 described anxiety or distress. That’s not surprising, given that child-development experts have long said testing boundaries and building autonomy are what adolescence is for. A