The quiet setting changes happening on your kid's phone

Hey Friends!

Prom just happened for our oldest. And while the night itself was a solid 11/10 — the photos, the party, the whole gang piling into a limo bus — we are still walking around going WE CANNOT BELIEVE IT.

There's something strange about this exact moment. We're standing with one foot in the tween years and one foot somewhere we didn't sign up for yet. The same kid we were negotiating screen time with what feels like ten minutes ago is about to head off to university in the fall. And it's made us think less about the rules we set and more about the foundation we built. Like, the digital wellness stuff we've been drilling for years without always knowing if it was landing.

What we keep reminding ourselves is that the goal was never to control every app and device forever. It was to raise someone who can look at a sketchy setting, a weird DM, a gloomy feeling after being on their phone for too long, and pause. To figure out what to do next, to adjust, or to just toss the phone down and go do something IRL for a change. Because once they leave the nest, that pause is the only parental control left. And that's the whole job. Making sure they are responsible digital citizens.

If you’re there with us or just getting started, just know there’s no one size fits all solution. We’re all doing what’s best for our family, making adjustments based on the information available to us at the time. This is hard and you’re not alone.

ICYMI: Meta added two privacy toggles that let it scan your camera roll

This one is about your device, not just your kid’s. There’s a setting in the Facebook app that reaches past your posts and into your actual camera roll. This setting uses your camera roll photos and videos to generate AI-powered collages or recaps, and suggests photos you haven't posted yet but might want to share. The unsettling part is that some users say they discovered these settings already enabled without ever seeing the popup or giving explicit consent.

Why this matters for parents specifically: Your camera roll is not a curated highlight reel. It's everything. Because AI can't tell what's in a photo before analyzing it, the company would need to scan everything in your camera roll, meaning IDs, medical and financial records, and intimate moments are all at risk of being scanned, retained, and shared. And it doesn't stop at you: Meta's AI privacy policy says the company may analyze images, including facial features, and that extends to anyone in your photos, such as children who never agreed to it. For those of us with hundreds (probably thousands for most of us) of pictures of our kids on our phones, that's the whole point of concern.

The good news is this one is a setting that you have control over, and you can shut it off in about thirty seconds. Here’s how:

1. Open the Facebook app, go to Settings & privacy

2. Select Settings

3. Then look for "Camera roll sharing suggestions."

4. You'll find two toggles, one for custom sharing suggestions and one for camera roll suggestions while browsing and you'll want to toggle them both of them off.

This is exactly the kind of buried, opt-you-in-by-default setting we walk parents through in the Screen Sense Guide, because the truth is these toggles move and multiply faster than any of us can keep up with, and knowing where to look is half the battle. Check yours today and check your partner's phone too, since this lives in the Facebook app account by account.

Instagram turned off encryption on your kid's DMs

If your kid uses Instagram, the privacy of their direct messages changed and there was no big announcement letting us all know (surprise, surprise). As of May 8, DMs that you send to people on Instagram will no longer feature full encryption, and your conversations are not protected from Meta.

End-to-end encryption is the thing that means only the sender and recipient can read a message, not the platform, not anyone else. With it gone, Meta can now access the content of messages, images, videos, and other media in DMs for purposes such as content moderation, safety features, AI development, and responding to legal requests. So every photo, voice note, and conversation your teen has in Instagram DMs is now readable by the company. There's a safety argument on the other side of this as the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children welcomed it because encryption had allowed perpetrators to evade detection, enabling the grooming and abuse of children to go unseen. But there's also the uncomfortable timing: messaging content can now be scanned, and Meta's wording leaves room for "product improvement," even though it says DMs aren't used for targeted ads right now.

What you can do here is mostly a conversation and not a setting to help shield kids from this. This is a great moment to talk to explain their Instagram DMs, and any communication platform, were never truly private, and now they're definitively not. Anything they wouldn't want a stranger or a company to read shouldn't live in there. For genuinely private conversations, Meta itself now points users toward WhatsApp, and apps like Signal also keep end-to-end encryption on by default. The bigger lesson for our kids is the one that outlasts any single app: assume the DM is not a diary.

Okay, after two stories about a company quietly rifling through your messages and your photos, we want to land somewhere warmer.

Here's the thing we needed to hear this week, sending our oldest toward the fall: you cannot lock down the whole internet. You never could. The apps will keep changing the rules, the toggles will keep flipping themselves on, and at some point your kid walks out the door with a phone you don't manage anymore. That can feel like failure ,but it isn't.

The foundation is the protection. Every time you've shown them where a sketchy setting hides, every time you've said "let's read what this pop-up actually wants before we tap yes," every awkward conversation, that's the part that leaves with them. Controls expire but judgment doesn't. So go easy on yourself this week. You're not behind. You're building the only thing that lasts. Talk soon.

—Cat & Nat