TIL: Parental controls aren't for parents
January 2, 2026
A few days ago, I found that a grown man had been texting my twelve-year-old son on his "kid-safe" Gabb phone. The man got my son's number through a children's book chat on an app called GroupMe. Thankfully my wife and I discovered the situation and intervened before anything bad happened; but still it was sickening to discover that on Christmas morning, while our family was unwrapping presents next to the tree, some creep had been texting my son: "What did you get? Send pictures."
How could we have let this happen? How could we be such careless parents?
But wait . . . hadn't we done what we were supposed to do? We bought the "kid-safe" phone. And we confirmed GroupMe was on the Gabb "approved apps" list, which, as I understand it, offers "no social media or high-risk options." We did the safe things, right?
Maybe not. Turns out Gabb's own blog appears to include GroupMe on a list of seven apps with dangerous chat features, describing it as an app that "opens the door to potential dangers." We were apparently supposed to find that warning ourselves, somewhere among Gabb's 572 blog posts:
$ curl -s \ https://gabb.com/post-sitemap.xml \ | grep -oE 'https://gabb\.com/blog/[^<]+' \ | sort -u \ | wc -l \ | xargs -I{} echo "{} blog posts as of $(date '+%B %d, %Y')" 572 blog posts as of January 02, 2026
But if GroupMe "opens the door" to danger, why did Gabb put it on their "approved apps" list? When I revisited the site, I noticed a small message beneath GroupMe mentioning Communication with Strangers. I hovered over it with my mouse pointer, and a tooltip appeared: "Allows contact and communication with people the child may not know."
So it allows communication with strangers, but it's not "high-risk?" The approved list isn't looking so safe. The approved list is apparently a catalog of risks I'm supposed to decipher by filtering through 838 apps and hovering my mouse pointer around to see tooltips:
$ for cat in \ existing_apps \ unapproved_apps \ unmet_criteria_apps \ music_apps; do count=$(curl -s "https://gabb.com/app-guide/" \ | grep -o "${cat} = \[.*\]" \ | head -1 \ | sed "s/${cat} = \[//" \ | sed "s/\]//" \ | tr ',' '
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