Don’t Use the App to Check If Your Kids Are Sexting
When I was a teenager, smartphones weren’t used, and neither was sexting. You’re not exactly going to shoot tastefully taken nude photos with a film camera and donate a scroll at your local drugstore to develop them so you can pass them on to your significant other between lessons.
With the proliferation of smartphones, sexting has become more and more common. Pew Research estimates that 1.2 million children have sent sexually explicit images to someone else via text messages, with most of those senders saying they felt compelled to do so at least once.
If you’re a parent who is concerned that your child is sending or receiving explicit messages, you have a ton of options, from ditching your cell phone to carefully monitoring incoming and outgoing messages.
Now there is an app that can also help you get through the hard work using artificial intelligence. A mobile app called Gallery Guardian tracks images and videos you share with and from a teen via text or social media apps, and then informs parents that those images might be a little inappropriate, Digital Trends reports . This sounds like a good idea to careful parents, but in practice it may not be quite prime time ready.
If the app detects that your teen is sending or receiving explicit images, it may also offer several ways to talk to him about the issue.
Of course, there are also downsides. First, using the app requires you to install it on your child’s phone and not uninstall it. You are already working in a lack of trust. If you are concerned about sexting your child may be experiencing, you better sit down and talk to him about it before it happens, rather than after you discover the problem through the spy app you have installed. on their phone.
Perhaps the biggest problem right now is how the app even detects that your child is sexting. Right now, images are also being sent to the cloud where they are analyzed, in part because the processing power required to run the algorithm is draining your phone’s battery. Although the app manufacturer states that they are transmitted using “the highest possible encryption”, you still agree that your nude teen photos will be sent to a third party. While they hope to eventually bring all of the data processing to your phone, this is certainly not the ideal scenario at this point.
The best solution? Sit down and talk to your teen. Both of you will be better off.