How safe are the apps your child uses?
Twenty-two platforms, rated independently across seven categories, with a recommended age for each. Choose your child’s age and the apps they actually use, and you’ll get a breakdown showing where the risks sit rather than a single verdict.
Every score has a date and a source behind it.
These scores and recommended ages are Wired Parents’ own assessment, based on platform documentation and published sources, checked on the dates shown. They are general information for parents, not professional advice. A lower-risk score is not a guarantee that a platform is safe or a recommendation to use it. Wired Parents is independent of every platform rated here. What your child uses is your decision.
What the seven categories measure
Content risk is what a child is likely to encounter without going looking for it. Contact risk is who can reach them, and how easily. Privacy is what the platform knows about your child and who else can see it. Parental controls is what tools exist and whether they work when tested, not whether they appear in a help centre. Data collection is what is gathered, kept and sold on. Transparency is whether the platform tells the truth to parents and regulators about how it operates. Bullying is how easy the platform makes it to target another child, and how hard it makes it to stop.
The first six categories measure what the platform does. Bullying measures what users do to each other, which is why it sits apart from the rest.
The four AI platforms carry no bullying score. There is no one else on a chatbot, so the category has nothing to measure. That is marked as not applicable rather than scored zero, because an absent risk and a well-handled risk are not the same thing and shouldn’t look the same.
How the scores work
Scores run 1 to 4, and higher is safer. A 4 means the platform does this well. A 1 means it does it badly enough that no setting you change at home will fix it.
Read the categories, not the average. A platform can score well overall and still carry one score that matters more to your family than the other six put together. Snapchat’s contact score is the clearest example: disappearing messages make oversight close to impossible regardless of what else the app does well. An average hides that. The breakdown doesn’t.
Why our recommended age sometimes differs from the platform’s
Every platform states a minimum age. Most of them set it at the lowest number their lawyers will allow, which in much of the world means 13, because that is where children’s privacy law bites rather than where the product becomes suitable.
So each platform carries two ages: the one the company states, and the one we recommend. Where they differ, the reasoning is in the notes.
Our recommended age is never lower than the platform’s own minimum. If a company says 13 and we think the product suits a careful 11-year-old, we still say 13. Undercutting a platform’s own floor would hand parents an argument against a rule the company itself set, and no scorecard should be doing that.
How current this is, and how you can tell
Every note carries the date it was last checked. Review dates are staggered rather than refreshed all at once, so a platform that hasn’t changed isn’t given a false stamp of currency.
What this will not tell you
It will not tell you whether your child should be on a platform. That depends on the child, and we don’t know yours.
It will not tell you that a well-scoring platform is safe. The scores are relative to each other, and a 4 for parental controls means best available, not sufficient.
It will not stay accurate between reviews. A platform can change its defaults overnight and frequently does. The dates are there so you can see how much weight a given note still carries.
How each platform is scored is set out in the methodology.
These ratings change when the platforms do.
We check them and tell you what moved.
