Parents WiredIn News: Online Safety Updates for Parents

Parents WiredIn News

The online-safety stories worth knowing about, in plain English — what changed and what it means for us.

Last updated 5 August 2026

A parent reading the news on a tablet at the kitchen table

Lawmakers turn to AI chatbots hidden inside children's toys

5 August 2026 · AI

Tucked into that same August 5 session was a bill about something a lot of us hadn't clocked yet: AI chatbots built right into children's toys — talking teddies and dolls that chat back. The worry is blunt — the big AI companies behind these bots say in their own fine print that under-13s shouldn't use them unsupervised, yet toymakers have licensed the very same technology into playthings anyway. Independent testing by the US PIRG's 'Trouble in Toyland' researchers found these toys could drift into adult themes and vulgar language the more a child played, were vague about the data they collect, and in some cases even nudged kids to keep going when they tried to stop. The Senate is weighing its version of a Children's AI Toy Safety Act, while a bill in the House would go further and ban making, importing or selling any kids' toy with an AI chatbot inside.

What this means for us

This one's worth filing away for birthdays and Christmas: an 'AI' or 'smart' talking toy isn't the same as a plain teddy, and the chatbot inside can wander somewhere you'd never expect. If a toy promises to 'chat' or 'learn', it's fair to check what it actually does, who it sends your child's words to, and whether it can be switched to a simple offline mode — and, as ever, the younger the child, the less they should be left alone with any device that talks back.

Source: US Congress (Rep. Blake Moore)

US Senate takes up a stack of AI-chatbot safety bills for kids

5 August 2026 · AI

On August 5 a US Senate committee sat down to work through a bundle of bills aimed at making AI safer for children — the clearest sign yet that lawmakers have shifted their attention from social media to the chatbots kids are now talking to every day. The one that matters most for parents is the CHATBOT Act: it would make AI companies set up 'family accounts' so parents of under-13s have to give the OK and can see and manage their child's chats, force the bots to admit they aren't a real person, ban advertising aimed at kids, and strip out the addictive little tricks — the rewards and constant pings — built to keep children hooked. Sitting alongside it were the Youth AI Privacy Act, which would limit how much of a child's data a chatbot can hoover up, plus the long-running Kids Online Safety Act and a bill on age checks. It's early days — a committee taking up a bill is a long way from it becoming law — and it follows some heartbreaking cases, including lawsuits from families who say a chatbot groomed their child or encouraged self-harm.

What this means for us

You don't have to wait on Washington for this one. If your kids use AI — for homework, for company, or just for a chat — it's worth knowing which apps they're on and having the calm, regular conversation that a chatbot is a clever program, not a friend, and never the place to take a worry about their body, their feelings or their safety. Those are 'come find me' moments — our family plan at /start is a good place to begin.

Source: US Senate Commerce Committee

PolicySocial Media Ban

US Senate takes up a kids-online-safety package — including a push to keep under-13s off social media

3 August 2026 · Policy

After years of stop-start, the US Senate is finally moving on kids' online safety: this first week of August the Senate Commerce Committee is set to mark up a bundle of bills, reportedly on August 5. The centerpiece is the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), which would force social media companies to switch minors' accounts to the strongest privacy and safety settings by default, hand parents real controls, and — through a 'duty of care' — make platforms legally answerable when their design pushes kids toward harm. Bundled alongside it is Chairman Ted Cruz's Kids Off Social Media Act, which would bar under-13s from social media outright and rein in the algorithms aimed at teens, plus a measure requiring AI companies to offer family accounts so parents can keep an eye on chatbot use. It has rare cross-party backing — Republicans Cruz and Marsha Blackburn alongside Democrats Richard Blumenthal and Maria Cantwell — and the Senate once passed an earlier KOSA 91-3, only for it to stall in the House over free-speech worries.

What this means for us

It's a real sign the US is inching toward its own rules, and worth keeping half an eye on — but 'marked up in committee' is a long way from becoming law, and even then it won't quietly log any kid off tomorrow. So this is one to watch, not wait on: the age settings and parental controls we put on the devices at home, plus the ordinary conversations, are still doing the real work today — our family plan at /start is the place to start.

Source: The Washington TimesRead the ban guide →

PolicySocial Media Ban

Australia's world-first under-16 ban has barely moved the needle — 8 in 10 kids are still on social media

31 July 2026 · Policy

The world's first under-16 social media ban has its first real report card, and it's a sobering one for anyone hoping a law alone would fix things. Australia's eSafety Commissioner found that three months in, 81.5% of 10-to-15-year-olds were still using an age-restricted platform — down only slightly from 85.9% before the ban took effect in December — while the share with their own account slipped from about 52% to 42%. The reason is blunt: more than half the kids surveyed said a platform never once asked them to prove their age, some were simply waved through as 16-plus, and many just self-reported an older age or kept browsing while logged out, which the rules still allow. eSafety is now investigating the big platforms — Meta, Snap, TikTok and YouTube among them — over whether they're really trying to comply. One unexpected twist: with kids quietly migrating to corners like Reddit and Pinterest, parents' awareness of what their children were actually using went down, not up.

What this means for us

Australia is the test case the US and UK are both watching, and the honest lesson is that a ban without working age checks barely dented things — and may even have pushed some kids somewhere harder for parents to see. That's not a reason to shrug; it's the reason the settings and conversations at home still matter most. Set accounts to a child's real age, switch on the controls, and keep the everyday check-ins going — our family plan at /start walks you through it.

Source: Tech Xplore (The Conversation)Read the ban guide →

Scams

FBI's back-to-school warning: think twice before you post that first-day photo

29 July 2026 · Scams

With kids heading back to class, the FBI's Atlanta field office put out a plain-spoken warning on July 29 about three things that trip families up this time of year. The first is the classic first-day-of-school photo: those cute pics often show a school name, a grade sign, a house number or a street sign — small details a stranger can stitch together to work out where a child is, or even guess the answers to security questions. The second, and most serious, is sextortion, where a predator posing as a peer coaxes a child into sending an explicit photo and then threatens to share it unless they pay — Georgia alone lost around $3 million to it in a year, most victims are boys, and some are as young as seven. The third is hoax school threats, which the FBI treats as real and which are a felony even when 'just a joke' or forwarded on. Its advice is refreshingly doable: spend ten minutes checking your child's privacy settings and parental controls, and keep talking.

What this means for us

The first-day photo is the easy win — crop out the school sign, house number and street before you post, and skip tagging the exact location. The bigger one is a conversation, not a setting: tell your kids now, before anything happens, that if someone pressures them over a photo they can come straight to you and won't be in trouble — paying or panicking only feeds it. If it does happen, stop replying, take screenshots, and report it to the FBI (1-800-CALL-FBI / ic3.gov) and NCMEC's Take It Down.

Source: Atlanta News First

PolicySocial Media Ban

New York finalizes its SAFE for Kids Act rules — no 'addictive' feeds or midnight pings for under-18s without a parent's OK

28 July 2026 · Policy

New York put the finishing touches on its SAFE for Kids Act on July 28, releasing the final rules that spell out how the 2024 law will actually work — and they take aim at the very features that keep kids glued to their phones. Under the rules, social media companies won't be allowed to show under-18s an algorithm-driven 'addictive' feed by default; instead young users get a plain, in-order feed of the accounts they follow, unless a parent opts them in. Platforms also can't ping under-18s with notifications between midnight and 6am without a parent's say-so. To do any of that, a company first has to reasonably work out who's under 18 — using something other than just a government ID — and get a parent's verified consent, and crucially a child can't be locked out of the app for saying no. The rules are formally published July 29 and take effect January 25, 2027, with fines of up to $5,000 per violation.

What this means for us

This is one of the first US laws to go after the design tricks — the endless feed and the late-night buzz — rather than just who's allowed on, and other states are watching. But it's a while off yet (2027) and it only covers New York, so it won't quietly fix things in your house tomorrow. The good news is you don't have to wait for a law: most phones and apps already let you switch off notifications overnight and turn off autoplay right now, on any device — our family plan at /start walks you through it.

Source: New York State (Governor's Office)Read the ban guide →

Gaming

Safety experts renew the warning: predators use Roblox to make contact, then move kids to Discord

27 July 2026 · Gaming

Child-safety experts sounded the alarm again on July 27 about the way predators pair two apps to reach children — striking up contact inside a game like Roblox, then steering the conversation onto Discord, where private servers let them message kids well out of a parent's view. Lawyers now representing hundreds of families describe it as a 'two-stage pipeline,' and several US state attorneys-general are suing both companies over exactly this. The experts' advice is refreshingly ordinary: talk to your kids before anything happens, watch for the warning signs — a lot more secrecy, hiding screens, logging in on a friend's phone — and go straight to police if a child has been contacted or sent something inappropriate. Roblox, for its part, rolled out age-based accounts in June, with chat switched off by default for its youngest users (5–8) and locked behind a parent's permission for 9–15s.

What this means for us

The pattern to remember is 'meet in the game, move to the chat app' — so it helps to know which messaging apps your kids actually use, not just the games they play. Set Roblox to your child's real age, keep chat limited or off, and keep having the calm, repeated chat that a friendly 'kid' in a game isn't always who they say — our Bark and Qustodio guides walk through the settings.

Source: WSAW NewsChannel 7

Social

Meta stands alone as a second 'social media addiction' trial opens in Los Angeles

27 July 2026 · Social

On July 27 a second big 'social media addiction' trial got underway in Los Angeles — and this time Meta, the company behind Instagram and Facebook, is facing the jury on its own. The case was brought by a teenager, known in court only as R.K.C., who says apps built to be hard to put down — endless scrolling, autoplay, constant pings — fed his depression, anxiety and sleep troubles. Snapchat's owner settled just a week earlier, on July 20, joining YouTube and TikTok, who had already reached their own deals with the same boy and left Meta as the last one standing. It is only the second of more than 3,000 similar family lawsuits to reach a courtroom; the first, back in February, ended with a jury finding Meta and Google liable and awarding $6 million.

What this means for us

These court fights will grind on for years, but the thread running through all of them is worth noticing at home: the apps are deliberately built to be hard to switch off. We don't have to wait for a verdict to push back — turning off autoplay, silencing overnight notifications and keeping phones out of the bedroom takes the sharpest edge off that design today.

Source: Claims Journal (Bloomberg)

PolicySocial Media Ban

Vietnam's twist: let under-16s keep their accounts, but switch off posting

24 July 2026 · Policy

A TechCrunch roundup on July 24 flagged Vietnam as the newest country weighing rules for kids on social media — with an unusual twist. Rather than locking under-16s out altogether the way Australia and France have, a draft decree from Vietnam's culture ministry would let them keep their accounts but strip away the ability to post, comment or react — so they can look, but not join in. Parents would have to register their child's account, and platforms would be expected to work out who the young users are and steer them toward age-appropriate content; a deputy minister framed it as aiming for 'an age-appropriate environment' rather than a blanket ban. The same push also floated capping under-16s at an hour a day per game. It's still only a draft, but it lands on a fast-growing list — Australia's under-16 ban is already live, France's under-15 law passed this month, and Denmark, Greece, Malaysia and others are drafting their own somewhere between ages 14 and 16.

What this means for us

The interesting part here isn't Vietnam specifically — it's that countries are trying different shapes of the same idea, from a hard lockout to this 'read-only for kids' halfway house. None of it, though, reaches into our own living rooms. Wherever we live, setting a child's account to their real age, switching on the parental controls and keeping up the ordinary conversations is still what does the real work — our family plan at /start is a good place to begin.

Source: TechCrunchRead the ban guide →

PolicySocial Media Ban

France becomes the first EU country to ban under-15s from social media

21 July 2026 · Policy

On July 21 both houses of France's parliament passed a law banning children under 15 from social media — the first blanket ban of its kind anywhere in the European Union. The same law also switches off cell phones in high schools, and it carves out exceptions for things like online encyclopedias and educational or scientific sites. President Macron, who made this one of his signature causes, wants it in force by the start of the new school year in September, though a constitutional review could push that back — and lawmakers openly admit the hard part is still age verification and what to do about the accounts under-15s already have. France's own health watchdog reported that around 90% of 12-to-17-year-olds use a smartphone every day and nearly six in ten use it for social media. It's the latest domino to fall after Australia's world-first under-16 ban.

What this means for us

Europe's biggest countries are now drawing a line, and France has gone furthest by writing it into law — but as their own officials admit, actually keeping under-15s logged out is the tricky part, and no ban reaches into our own living rooms. Wherever we live, the age settings and controls we put on the devices, plus the ordinary conversations, are still what do the real work — start with our family plan at /start.

Source: NPRRead the ban guide →

PolicySocial Media Ban

The catch with checking kids' ages: everyone may end up proving theirs

21 July 2026 · Policy

As country after country moves to keep under-16s off social media, Fortune laid out the quiet trade-off on July 21: to check that a user isn't a child, a platform has to check everyone — so age rules aimed at kids are nudging the whole internet toward proving ID. It's not theoretical. Australia banned under-16s back in December, yet six months on more than 60% of those teens still had access, slipping past the checks with everything from makeup to fake IDs, VPNs and a family member's account. The UK's Ofcom has opened an investigation into TikTok's age-guessing and is pushing platforms toward stricter face- or ID-based checks, while France's new under-15 ban is stuck choosing between privacy-invasive ID scans and face scans that are easy to fool. Here in the US, Congress is advancing the Kids Online Safety Act and an App Store Accountability Act that raise the very same privacy questions. The honest bottom line: no age-check method yet is both hard to fool and easy on privacy.

What this means for us

It's worth understanding the bargain buried in these laws — the price of reliably checking kids' ages tends to be everyone handing over more proof of who they are, and none of it is watertight yet anyway. That's not a reason to wait for the rules to catch up. Whatever the law does, the age settings and parental controls we put on the devices at home — plus the ordinary conversations — are still doing the real work, and our family plan at /start is the place to begin.

Source: FortuneRead the ban guide →

Social

Threads is finally getting parental supervision — time limits and a sleep mode

21 July 2026 · Social

Meta announced on July 21 that Threads — its X-style app tied to Instagram — is finally getting parental supervision, run through the same Family Center that already covers Instagram. Once a teen accepts the invite, parents can see how much time they've spent on Threads each day over the past week, set a daily time limit, block the app during set hours, and switch on a sleep mode that quiets it from 10pm to 7am. Parents can also decide who's allowed to tag their teen and whether under-16s are able to loosen any of these settings. It rolls out to families in the US the week after the announcement and goes worldwide by the end of the year. The timing is a little awkward for Meta: it landed in the same stretch that EU regulators said the company's parental controls on Instagram and Facebook hadn't done enough to blunt 'addictive' design.

What this means for us

If your teen is on Threads, this is worth actually setting up rather than assuming it's on — it only kicks in once you've sent the invite and they've accepted it. Handy features, but notice the fine print: a teen can switch supervision off (you just get a heads-up when they do), so treat it as a helper alongside the ordinary check-ins, not a set-and-forget lock. The sleep-mode idea is a good one to borrow on any app — a phone that goes quiet overnight helps kids actually sleep.

Source: Meta

Scams

FBI warning: scammers are now using AI 'deepfake' videos of officials to look real

20 July 2026 · Scams

On July 20 the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center — the IC3 — warned about a scam that leans heavily on AI. Crooks are posting AI-generated 'deepfake' videos that show senior FBI officials urging people to report crimes, then funneling them to fake, official-looking IC3 websites that quietly harvest personal details, and they're also running phony FBI profiles on Facebook Messenger and Telegram. The scheme mostly preys on people who've already been scammed once, dangling the promise of helping them 'recover' the money they lost. The FBI's own advice is blunt: the IC3 has no social media accounts and will never message or phone you out of the blue — so type www.ic3.gov in yourself, and never send money to someone who contacted you first.

What this means for us

The lesson that matters for our families is bigger than this one scam: a face or a voice on a screen is no longer proof of who you're really talking to — AI can now fake a convincing video of an official, a celebrity, even a friend. That's the same trick behind a lot of what worries us with kids, from fake 'friends' in games to sextortion. Worth a calm chat: if anyone — however official they look — is rushing you, asking for money, or pushing a link, stop and check them through a phone number or website you already know.

Source: FBI (IC3)

Screen time

US pediatricians drop the strict 'two hours a day' rule — it's more about what and how than how long

20 July 2026 · Screen time

America's pediatricians have quietly changed their tune on screen time, and a clear explainer this month laid out what it means for parents. Back in January the American Academy of Pediatrics retired the old 'two hours a day, full stop' guideline it had leaned on for a decade — the number a lot of us grew up feeling guilty about. In its place is a more honest, if fuzzier, message: what your child is doing on the screen, and the life around it, matters more than the raw hour count. Passively watching an endless video feed isn't the same as video-calling grandma, building something in a game with friends, or making a little movie — and sleep, exercise, meals and family time are what really shouldn't get squeezed out. For toddlers the advice is still cautious (little to no screens under 18 months, and only about an hour of good stuff for ages 2–5), but for school-age kids and teens it's now about the whole picture, not a stopwatch.

What this means for us

If you've ever felt like a failure for blowing past 'two hours,' this is permission to breathe. The swap that actually helps isn't a stricter timer — it's asking what they're doing and making sure screens aren't crowding out sleep, moving their bodies, and time with us. A simple test at home: is the screen replacing something that matters, or sitting alongside it? Keep the bedrooms and the dinner table screen-free and you've done most of the heavy lifting.

Source: Medical Xpress (The Conversation)

Social

UK regulator opens a formal investigation into TikTok's age checks

16 July 2026 · Social

Ofcom, the UK's online safety regulator, has opened a formal investigation into whether TikTok is meeting its legal duties to protect children from harmful content. The sticking point is TikTok's 'age inference' approach — rather than checking ID, it guesses a user's age from how they behave on the app, and Ofcom says its evidence suggests that guesswork may be missing significant numbers of children. The regulator has already ruled the method out as 'highly effective' for adult sites, because it has to watch someone's activity for a while before making a call — which means it isn't really stopping underage access at the front door. TikTok says it's confident it meets its obligations and has invested billions in safety over eight years in the UK. If a breach is found, the fine could reach £18 million or 10% of TikTok's worldwide revenue, with an update expected around October.

What this means for us

It's the same lesson we keep bumping into: the platforms' own age-guessing still lets plenty of kids slip through. If your child uses TikTok, it's worth setting up Family Pairing and the device-level controls yourself rather than waiting for the app to work out how old they are.

Source: Ofcom

PolicySocial Media Ban

UK regulator opens a formal investigation into TikTok's age checks

16 July 2026 · Policy

A day after its big age-assurance report, Ofcom announced on 16 July that it is formally investigating TikTok over whether the app is doing enough to keep children safe under the UK's Online Safety Act. The specific worry is age-estimation: Ofcom says the kind of models TikTok leans on may be failing to correctly spot a sizeable share of the children using the app, which means kids could be seeing content that was never meant for them. It is not a slap on the wrist — if Ofcom finds TikTok fell short, it can levy fines of up to £18 million or 10% of the company's worldwide revenue, whichever is bigger, and in the very worst cases even ask the courts to have the service blocked in the UK. The investigation is expected to run at least three months, with an update due in October.

What this means for us

It's a useful reminder that even the age checks the big platforms are proud of don't reliably tell a 12-year-old from an adult — the regulator itself isn't convinced. So it's worth setting your own child's account to their real birth date and switching on the family/teen supervision tools rather than trusting the app to sort ages out on its own.

Source: Digital Watch ObservatoryRead the ban guide →

Meta will now tell parents if their teen talks to its AI about suicide or self-harm

16 July 2026 · AI

Meta announced on 16 July that parents who supervise a teen on Instagram will start getting an alert if that teen talks to Meta's AI chatbot about suicide or self-harm. A dedicated system flags the conversation, a real person on Meta's team reviews it before any alert goes out — the company admits it would rather risk a false alarm than miss something — and in cases that look like immediate danger, Meta says it will contact emergency services, as it already does for worrying posts on Facebook and Instagram. Parents can also now switch on a 'Limited Content' setting that carries over to the AI, on top of the bot's existing rules against sexual, romantic or alcohol-related chats with teens. It's live now in the US, UK, Australia and Canada, with the rest of the world to follow by the end of the year. The move lands amid growing pressure — and lawsuits — over how AI chatbots handle kids in crisis.

What this means for us

If your teen is on Instagram, this only kicks in once you've actually set up supervision, so it's worth doing rather than assuming it's automatic. It's a genuinely helpful safety net, but it works best alongside the ordinary check-ins — an alert like this would be a heavy moment, and a calm, no-blame conversation (plus a call to your GP or a helpline like Kids Helpline) matters far more than any single setting.

Source: TechCrunch

PolicySocial Media Ban

UK plans a midnight-to-6am social media 'curfew' for 16- and 17-year-olds

16 July 2026 · Policy

On July 16 the UK government set out plans to give 16- and 17-year-olds a built-in overnight break from social media — a default lockout from midnight to 6am on apps like Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, with 'keep scrolling' tricks like autoplay and infinite feeds switched off by default for that age group too. It's meant as a gentler step than an outright ban: teens would be able to turn the settings back off, but the government points to trials where more than nine in ten teenagers left the safer defaults switched on. It sits alongside Britain's bigger plan to bar under-16s from social media altogether, which is expected around 2027. Not everyone is convinced — the child-safety charity NSPCC called an opt-out curfew a 'sticking plaster' — and it still has to be written into law before anything actually changes.

What this means for us

There's a nice idea buried in here for any of us: a phone that quietly winds down at bedtime helps kids actually sleep. We don't have to wait for a UK law to do it — most phones and parental-control apps let you set 'downtime' overnight and turn off autoplay right now, on any device, wherever you live.

Source: Al JazeeraRead the ban guide →

Scams

UK regulator finalises new rules to choke off scam texts at the source

15 July 2026 · Scams

On July 15 the UK's communications regulator, Ofcom, finalised a package of rules leaning on mobile networks to cut off scam text messages before they ever reach us. Providers will now have to block the numbers and dodgy web links scammers use, run proper 'know your customer' checks on businesses sending bulk texts so criminals can't pose as a parcel courier or the tax office, cap how many messages a cheap pay-as-you-go SIM can fire out, and withhold caller ID on calls from abroad that fake a UK mobile number. It is a real problem: four in ten UK mobile users had a suspicious message in just three months, and £1.28 billion was lost to fraud last year. Ofcom also pointed everyone back to the simplest tool we all have — forward a dodgy text to 7726 and your network can act on it.

What this means for us

Scam texts are one of the most common ways trouble lands on our kids' phones, usually dressed up as a missed delivery or an 'account locked' panic. A good family rule: never tap a link in a text you weren't expecting — open the app or website yourself — and get the kids into the habit of forwarding anything fishy to 7726, or just showing you, rather than replying.

Source: Ofcom

PolicySocial Media Ban

UK regulator: age checks are spreading fast — but sites still let too many kids through

15 July 2026 · Policy

Ofcom, the UK's online-safety regulator, published its first big 'age assurance' report on 15 July, taking stock of how well websites and apps are actually checking who is a child. The encouraging part: proper, hard-to-fool age checks are being rolled out at a scale we haven't seen before, and the share of children asked to prove their age who met a genuinely effective check climbed from about 25% to 43% in six months. The blunt part: the social platforms are still doing a poor job of enforcing their own minimum ages, and Ofcom said they will have to get a lot better if any under-16 rules are going to mean anything. It also ruled out one popular shortcut — quietly guessing a user's age from how they behave after they have signed up — as not good enough on its own for the sites that must keep children out. Ofcom has been asked to report back by the end of October on how a reliable 'are you over 16?' check could actually work, to feed into the UK's planned ban.

What this means for us

The honest headline is that the tech is getting better but still isn't watertight, so plenty of kids are still getting through the front door. Until it catches up, the age settings and parental controls we put on the devices at home are still doing most of the real work — that's where our family plan at /start comes in.

Source: OfcomRead the ban guide →

Scams

Australian regulator: platforms still aren't catching 'sextortion' aimed at kids

15 July 2026 · Scams

Australia's eSafety Commissioner published a report on July 15 grading how well the big platforms spot child sexual exploitation — and found real gaps, above all around 'sextortion,' where someone cons a young person into sending an intimate photo and then threatens to spread it unless they pay. In just six months the regulator logged more than 2,000 sextortion complaints, and it's teenage boys and young men who are hit hardest — more than one in ten 16-to-18-year-olds had been targeted, and over half of victims were first approached before they turned 16. The report gave some credit — Google and Snap got better at catching known abuse images, and Meta widened its grooming detection — but said too many services still wait for victims to report rather than catching it themselves, with private messaging and video calls the biggest blind spots. It's a US story too: the FBI has been sounding the alarm about the same fast, money-driven sextortion scams sweeping American teens.

What this means for us

This is one online danger a lot of us never see coming, and it moves fast — sometimes start to finish in a single evening. The strongest protection here isn't a setting, it's a promise: tell your kids plainly, before it ever happens, that if anyone pressures them over a photo they can come straight to you and they will not be in trouble. Paying or panicking only feeds it — the way out is to stop replying, take screenshots, and report it to the platform and to NCMEC's Take It Down (or the FBI).

Source: Digital Watch Observatory

Common Sense Media: Google's AI search answers are an 'unacceptable risk' for kids

15 July 2026 · AI

Common Sense Media — the nonprofit behind the movie and app age ratings a lot of us already lean on — put the AI answers built into Google Search through more than 2,600 tests on accounts set up for an 11-year-old and a 15-year-old, and rated them an 'unacceptable risk' for children. In their testing the AI missed a big share of clear mentions of suicide, brushed past other signs of a kid in crisis, handed out shaky health information, and even helped make deepfakes and clone a voice. The part that stings most for parents: unlike a standalone chatbot you choose to open, these AI answers appear automatically at the top of ordinary Google searches — including on the Chromebooks handed out in schools — and right now there's no switch to turn them off. Google pushed back, saying the report leaned on 'contrived' questions and pointing to its own guardrails and tools like SafeSearch and Family Link.

What this means for us

The takeaway isn't to panic about Google — it's a reminder that AI answers now sit right at the top of the plain searches our kids use for homework, and they can get serious things wrong. Worth a calm chat that the confident little summary at the top isn't always right, and that anything about health, feelings or safety is a 'come find me' moment, not a 'just ask Google' one.

Source: Common Sense Media