Digital Smarts - Keeping Sexts a Secret

Sadly, sexting doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon. With the growth in mobile devices, sexting has become even more prevalent than when it first received widespread attention. A recent study of several Texas high schools found that more than a quarter of the students reported having sent a naked photo of themselves, even though they were likely to report feeling bothered by being asked for one.

That’s where something called vault apps come into play. Vault apps offer sophisticated toolboxes offering more privacy controls and are available  both as free and subscription based formats. Of course this also means more for parents to manage, including such apps as Calculator%, Keep Safe Private Photo Vault, and Best Secret Folder. Telltale signs that teens may be using vault apps include hiding phone screens, refusing to give over passwords, and sudden increases in device use.

Parents concerned about vault apps can take proactive measures by enabling parental controls. For families with iPhones, parents can screen apps before they are downloaded to their children’s iPhones with a feature called Ask to Buy.

By turning on Ask to Buy, whenever a child wants to download an app (whether free or paid), it sends a request to the parent’s iPhone, and the parent can then approve or deny the download. The steps, which are available on Apple’s website, involve setting up each iPhone with Family Sharing and then enabling Ask to Buy for the child’s iPhone.

For families with Android devices, parents can enable parental controls inside Google Play’s app store to allow children to download apps only at a certain maturity level. For stricter controls, parents can download an app called AppLock on the child’s device and lock down any app that they suspect to be a vault app by using a PIN code.