Taking a More Balanced Approach to Adolescent Mobile Safety

Adolescent online safety is becoming more challenging as teens are prolifically using mobile smart phones. Parental control applications ("apps") are available, but, the adoption rates of such apps are remarkably low and may not adequately address the problem at hand. To examine this further, we propose three studies 1) a structured analysis of existing adolescent online safety apps, 2) a survey-based study to confirm our hypotheses that the values embedded in the features of these existing apps are sub-optimal, and 3) building a prototype of a new online safety app with features that better meet the needs of parents and teens.