Protection or Punishment? Relating the Design Space of Parental Control Apps and Perceptions about Them to Support Parenting for Online Safety

Abstract

Parental control apps, which are mobile apps that allow parents to monitor and restrict their children's activities online, are becoming increasingly adopted by parents as a means of safeguarding their children's online safety. However, it is not clear whether these apps are always beneficial or effective in what they aim to do; for instance, the overuse of restriction and surveillance has been found to undermine parent-child relationship and children's sense of autonomy. While previous research has categorised and taken inventory of key features of popular parental control apps, they have not systematically analysed the ways such features were designed or realised in such apps, or in particular how aspects of such designs might relate to parents and children's experiences with such apps. In this work, we investigate this gap, asking specifically: how might children's and parents' perceptions be related to how parental control features were designed? To investigate this question, we conducted an analysis of 58 top Android parental control apps designed for the purpose of promoting children's online safety, finding three major axes of variation in how key restriction and monitoring features were realised: granularity, feedback/transparency, and parent-child communications support. To relate these axes to perceived benefits and problems, we then analysed 3264 app reviews to identify references to aspects of the each of the axes above, to understand children's and parents' views of how such dimensions related to their experiences with these apps. Our findings led towards 1) an understanding of how parental control apps realise their functionalities differently along three axes of variation, 2) an analysis of exactly the ways that such variation influences children's and parents' perceptions, respectively of the usefulness or effectiveness of these apps, and finally 3) an identification of design recommendations and opportunities for future apps by contextualising our findings within existing digital parenting theories.CCS Concepts: • Human-centered computing → Walkthrough evaluations; HCI theory, concepts and models; Empirical studies in HCI.

From Parental Control to Joint Family Oversight

“…Due to these reasons, these apps have failed to foster positive parent-teen relationships. Instead, Wang et al [47] suggested that parents and children would prefer apps that provide transparency and feedback, while Cranor et al [16] argued that teens should have some level of privacy in their online activities. Next, we synthesize the relevant literature that discusses the benefits of a more collaborative approach to family online safety.…”

12 Ways to Empower: Designing for Children’s Digital Autonomy

“…The HCI community has extensive research expertise regarding designing with/for children [45,55,131] that support and empower them to make more informed decisions, and contributed many individual examples of human-centred systems for children that span across a variety of application domains. Design exemplars include supporting children's cognitive understanding of key computational concepts through child-friendly ways, such as Lego's Caption Safety [92] and Google's Be Internet Legends [61]; designs that support children to make sense of what happened around their data, such as Cracknell Law's situated cartoon design [80]; designs that help children comprehend the online risks around them, such as stranger danger and online inappropriate content [140]. Meanwhile, a growing body of research has been carried out regarding how to empower children with greater control over their interaction with the digital technologies, such as through having greater autonomy on their online media choices [59,71], and dealing with various kinds of online risks [141,152].…”

KOALA Hero: Inform Children of Privacy Risks of Mobile Apps

“…At the scoping stage, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 12 parents-and-children pairs [42] to identify barriers for parents and children to cope with online privacy risks. We then followed up with a systematic review of current parental control apps available on the Google PlayStore [39] to identify gaps in the current technological support. This review identified families' needs for better support for understanding online privacy risks, enhancing children's risk coping skills development, and facilitating parents' and children's communications about online safety and privacy.…”

“…However, this reliance on parental control apps has raised many questions about their efficacy. Research has revealed that the monitoring or surveillance-based approach commonly found in the current parental control apps not only reduces the potential effectiveness of such an approach but also may inadvertently damage parents' and children's mutual trust, introduce new harms or take away valuable opportunities for digital environments for children [15,39,40]. Furthermore, these approaches largely focus on direct online harms, such as cyber-bullying or inappropriate content, and provide little support for children to comprehend risks related to online data privacy and associated datafication harms.…”