YOUR PARENTAL CONTROL APP IS SPYING ON YOUR KIDS
These Apps Don’t Just Monitor — They Spy and Sell
Picture this: your child’s phone is locked down. Content filters on. Location tracking on. Parental control app proudly installed. You finally exhale — you’ve done the responsible thing.
But there’s a problem almost no one talks about.
The app guarding your child’s screen may also be quietly collecting, storing, and sharing their data — turning your child’s “safety” tool into another source of surveillance and profit. This isn’t a scare story. It’s how many of these apps are actually built to work.
Parental control apps are marketed as digital guardians. Offering parents peace of mind by protecting kids from online dangers and influences. But under the hood, many of these tools act more like spyware — harvesting extremely sensitive information and quietly feeding it into the machinery of the surveillance economy.
Many user agreements openly admit that they sell your personal information. Others insist they don’t — until investigations later reveal that they’ve been quietly selling millions of records all along. source
What They Track.
Most parental monitoring apps go far beyond basic screen time limits and monitoring features. Here’s a sample of what many of them quietly collect:
- Real-time GPS location (updated as frequently as every few seconds)
- Complete SMS and app message logs (including deleted messages)
- Call history and contact lists Web history and search queries
- Photos and videos stored on the device
- Social media activity, including screenshots of Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and other apps
- Microphone and camera access, in some cases (under the guise of "emergency tools") This is the kind of invasive data extraction that would be illegal without consent — but because it's done under the pretense of “parental control,” it's given a free pass. (Abdullah and Baidilah 2022).i
Where the Data Goes.
Here's where things get darker. Many of these apps don’t just collect the data and keep it between parent and child. They store it on corporate servers — and that data becomes a monetizable asset.
Many parents who aren’t tech savvy and even those that are will forget, non know, or downplay that the information gleamed from their children’s devices isnt directly linked to their (parents) phone. The information is first sent and saved onto a server, maybe in Minneapolis maybe in Belarus. The point and the worry is, computer security and personal security and your children's safety is in proportion to the competency and moral character of those handling the devices and software that collect all your family’s data to not to sell it or even worse use it against you.
The scary shit.
A 2021 report by The Markup found that Life360, one of the most popular family tracking apps, was selling precise location data to dozens of data brokers. These brokers then resell it to advertisers, insurance companies, and even law enforcement. This isn't a bug — it's part of the business model. In fact, Life360 was described by one data broker as "one of the most valuable sources of data”(Keegan and Ng 2021).ii
Another app, Bark, has been praised for its AI-based alerts about bullying or self-harm. But even Bark’s privacy policy acknowledges it may “share personal information with third-party service providers and business partners.”
And then there’s mSpy, a widely used app that’s often installed without the child’s knowledge. It has a history of data breaches and has been flagged repeatedly by security experts for lax protections. One 2018 leak exposed thousands of user credentials and activity logs (Krebs 2018).iii
The Data Is Forever
Parents might think, “I’m just checking on my kid — no one else will see this.” But the minute that data hits a server, it’s at risk of:
- Being resold
- Leaked in a breach
- Accessed by employees, contractors, stalkers, or foreign governments
- Used to build profiles for future advertising or insurance risk scores
Hitting delete is like shaking your phone to get your steps in for the day. It may make you feel better, but you really didn't do anything. The app and the company may retain the data for months or even years. And your child’s browsing history, location, messages, and photos become just another data point in the global trade of behavioral profiling.
From Home to the Panopticon
The terrifying irony is clear. Parents install these apps to protect their children from strangers online — while the app itself acts like a stranger watching from the shadows. The home becomes a testing ground for how we normalize surveillance: not just accepting it, but paying for it, enabling it, and calling it “good parenting.”
End Notes and References
i Abdullah, Muhammad Naim, and Nurhafisah Baidilah. 2022. “CCMTV: Android Parental Spying Apps Utilizing Child’s Phone Camera and Microphone.” AIP Conference Proceedings 2617 (1): 040004. https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0119764
ii Keegan, Jon, and Alfred Ng. 2021. “The Popular Family Safety App Life360 Is Selling Precise Location Data on Its Tens of Millions of Users.” The Markup, December 6, 2021. https://themarkup.org/privacy/2021/12/06/the-popular-family-safety-app-life360-is-selling-precise-location-data-on-its-tens-of-millions-of-user
iii (Maier, Tanczer, and Klausner 2025).i
i Maier, Eva-Maria, Leonie Maria Tanczer, and Lukas Daniel Klausner. 2025. “Surveillance Disguised as Protection: A Comparative Analysis of Sideloaded and In-Store Parental Control Apps.” arXiv, April 2025. https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.16087
