Parental Control BrightCanary

I understand the want for this app, but it’s an invasion of privacy. I recently found out it looks at music and lyrics on Apple Music and that makes me very uncomfortable, seeing as I’m allowed to listen to music with swear words, but it still flags them. I have several other friends with this app and they repeatedly get in trouble for things that are accidental or out of their control. It also flags random content like funny videos it deems offensive/bullying. I understand the want for an app like this, but the execution is terrible. If you can’t trust your kids to come talk to you if something happens, that’s bad parenting, not an excuse to install a tracking app on their phone. Kids should have privacy and not have to worry about their parents watching their every move. What if it flags something inappropriate that’s actually nothing, but it’s while looking through your phone your parents find something private, like a crush? Sorry for the long review, but we need more reviews on here from kids with the app, not just parents. Also, almost all the good reviews are from parents, and nearly every review from a kid on here is negative, and saying they feel watched. Yeah, me too. I hate this app and I feel less safe with it. I don’t know if this is for everyone, but hopefully some adults can relate, having this app is like seeing a cop in public. You know you aren’t doing anything, but what if you accidentally do, and they see it, and you get in trouble? That’s the best way I can describe it. Anyways, don’t get this app, just talk to your kid if you’re worried. It’s literally that easy.

We have been using this app for our now two teenage children for the last few years. It is hands-down the best option of any that exist on the market in terms of ease of set up, functionality, and meaningful output. It is also surprisingly affordable. When we first began using the app, we had some difficulty with getting customer support for bugs and other issues as updates were rolled out. That has improved dramatically, and now not only are they responsive, but we’ve even been supported in making recommendations for new app features and kept abreast of when those rollouts were going to occur. Monitoring children’s social media usage can be arduous and overwhelming. This app allows you to customize it in a way that provides you the high-level overview of concern concerns that you want to know to keep your children safe, without the hassle of other apps or legwork of manually reviewing your child’s texts and phone activity. Highly recommended.

I continue to use this because I haven’t found a better option but continue to be disappointed in what is provided. Sometimes the app will go for days without updating texts, most recently a week with no key logging results even though texts were working. The app you have to install on your kids phone has AI built in that can’t be turned off. At first it was actually the parent facing AI, in the newest update now it’s clearly meant to be child facing but I don’t want my child to have access to AI and now there is keyboard setting access which will make it easier for the child to mess with the keyboard settings. Support has told me I can block these by using the Apple app limits to block the app but then support has also told me when I use Apple app limits to block the child from accessing the app it also affects functionality and that’s why I just randomly don’t receive key logging or text messages for days at a time. Also really really don’t love that they have needed her Apple ID AND password AND asked me for my screen time pin. Super expensive for flaky performance. I will keep using until I can find a better option or Apple makes their parental controls more reliable but very unhappy.