“Is AI Secretly Tracking Your Children Online?”

I want to ask you something personal. Do you know what data apps are collecting about your child right now — as they read this, play a game, or scroll through TikTok?

Most families don’t. And that’s exactly what the tech industry is counting on.

In 2024, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission released a devastating report finding that major social media and video streaming companies had engaged in “vast surveillance” of users with “lax privacy controls and inadequate safeguards for kids and teens.” The FTC specifically called out the use of AI-powered advertising systems that target children with behavioural manipulation — showing kids exactly the ads, content, and emotional triggers most likely to keep them online and spending.

Meanwhile, 81% of parents of online teens say they are concerned about how much information advertisers can learn about their child’s online behaviour — yet only a fraction understand how AI makes that surveillance more powerful than ever before.

How AI-Powered Tracking Works

When your child uses an app, AI systems are building a profile: what they click on, how long they pause on certain images, what emotions a post triggers, when they’re most likely to make an in-app purchase. This isn’t passive data collection. Modern AI models predict behaviour, create personalised content feeds, and can even detect when a user is sad, lonely, or bored — then serve content designed to deepen that emotional state to increase engagement.

A study from Common Sense Media found that children’s apps routinely share data with third-party advertisers without meaningful parental consent. Dark patterns — interface design tricks that make children accidentally share personal information or agree to terms they don’t understand — are now AI-optimised at scale.

And here’s the thing that should concern every parent of a young child: under COPPA (Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act) in the US, websites are only required to get parental consent for children under 13. But 40% of children ages 8–12 are already active on social media platforms that are legally only for teens. Their data is being collected, and they have none of the legal protections teenagers and adults do.

How AI Is Watching Your Kids – Practical Steps for Families

Start with a privacy audit tonight. Go through every app on your child’s device and check the privacy settings. Look for location sharing — a 2024 Cox Mobile survey found that 56% of parents reported their children’s location sharing was turned on across mobile apps. Second, use a VPN designed for families (like those built into routers) to reduce behavioural tracking. Third, regularly delete cookies and browsing history from your child’s devices. Fourth, talk to your kids about not sharing their real name, school, or location in any app profile.

The OECD’s 2025 report on children in the digital age makes it clear: privacy literacy is now as essential as reading literacy. The earlier we build it, the safer our families will be.

Book Recommendation: Privacy Is Power by Carissa Véliz (2021)

Oxford professor Carissa Véliz makes a compelling case in her book, Privacy is Power, for why data privacy is a human rights issue, written in clear, accessible language any parent can absorb.

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There are a handful of people you may be lucky to meet, who care more about you than you sometimes care about yourself. There is family, and there is the family that allows you to sleep in their house when you don’t have anywhere else to go. There are boys, and there are men, but there was only my uncle Karl Fourie from Joburg.

I can never forget him, especially because of the special moments we shared when he visited me in Ningbo, Zhejiang, while I was doing my MBA at Ningbo University from 2013-2015. He had been to China before and used an agent from Hong Kong, Ray Chong, to guide him. We met with the factory boss  in Yinzhou district after 18h00, and ended up having dinner after 21h00. The factory boss insisted his assistant, Rose, must take us for dinner after the meeting. Unbeknowst to me, my uncle Karl Fourie, had been doing manufacturing some locks at a factory in Ningbo for years. He had a long-standing contract to replace locks in some government owned insfrastucture in Gauteng, South Africa. It was after 23h00 when we visinished, and late for me to get back to my dormintory room in Ningbo University, on the other side of town. So my uncle insisted I sleep over in his very large double bed room in the hotel nearby.

Because this was a rare opportunity, I invited two friends interested in doing business with South Africa to join us for breakfast. One of them was a local Chinese who wanted to find new business opportunities in South Africa, and the other was a fellow-MBA student from Senegal. They both had a great time getting to know my uncle Karl Fourie from Joburg. The Chinese student offered to take my uncle to the airport as there was no subway at that time to do so, and it was also a limited time.

My uncle Karl Fourie from Joburg passed away in May 2018 after a long time in the ICU of a hospital in Johannesburg due to a freak accident. He was my father’s cousin, a steadfast pillar of the Thomas family from Bosmont, west of Johannesburg. While my early memories of him revolve around family gatherings—like the 50th birthday party he hosted for my father, Raymond “Beetle” Thomas, around 2002—our relationship deepened when I bought a house in Winchester Hills, nearby from him in Robertsham.

Over the years, Uncle Karl did many small and big things to help my family and me. Our conversations reveal a man whose quiet strength and unwavering support were constants in my life. They show a professional dedicated to building a better South Africa and a family man who never hesitated to extend a hand.

The Mentor and the Safe Harbour

Karl’s personal support was quiet, practical, and unconditional.

The messages tell a clear story. In 2012, he was the first to alert me when another uncle, Leon Thomas, went missing, suffering from epileptic fits. He didn’t just share news; he mobilised action, urging me to “see if you can find out more” and to use social media to help. He followed up with a simple “Thanks” when I got involved, trusting me to handle it.

His support was often a calm solution in times of uncertainty. In late 2014, when I needed a place to stay in Johannesburg, my one request was simple: “I only need Internet access. Food and everything else I’ll take care of myself.” Within hours, Karl was problem-solving, suggesting his guest house in Suurbekom, Westonaria and asking for my dates. When I said I’d come after Christmas, his response was a characteristically steady, “Ok. Keep me posted.”

He helped my younger with an office job to get some work experience soon after he finished grade 12. He organised dinners, parties and was more often than not the life of the party. His work ethic was incredible.

A Builder of Integrity: Karl Fourie from Joburg

Karl’s professional life was a testament to his commitment to accountability and development.

While he was my uncle, to the public sector and corporate South Africa, he was Karl Fourie AGA (SA) CIA ACFE, the managing member and driving force behind Xavier Corporate Services. Founded in 1999 with his wife Aliwiya Jardine, their company was built on a mission to serve.

The Man Who Connected Worlds

Karl seamlessly wove together his professional diligence and personal care.

His Facebook and WhatsApp messages showed how these two worlds merged. In 2015, when he was planning a business trip to China, our exchange was typical. He kept me posted on his visa; I offered my local number, advice on beating the Great Firewall, and a suggestion to visit Hangzhou, a nearby city. He absorbed it all with gratitude and his usual concise planning: “About 10 days. Will keep it in mind.”

A Legacy of Steadfast Support

Uncle Karl’s legacy is dual-faceted. Publicly, it is etched into a successfull family busienss. He was a certified professional accountant who dedicated his skills to the unglamorous, essential work of ensuring accountability and clean audits.

Privately, his legacy lives on in the quiet confidence he instilled in those he loved. He didn’t give grand speeches; he gave timely alerts, practical accommodation, wise counsel, and reliable votes of confidence. He was the relative you could call when in need.

As I reflect on our last Facebook messages, I am struck by their normalcy—discussions about China, family, and travel. There was no grand farewell, only the assumption of continued support. That was his gift: making his steadfast presence feel like a permanent, reliable fact of life.

There are a handful of people you may be lucky to meet, who care more about you than you sometimes care about yourself. There is family, and there is the family who allows you to sleep in their house when you don’t have anywhere else to go. There are boys and there are men, but there is only one uncle Karl Fourie from Joburg (RIP).

The post RIP My Uncle Karl Fourie From Joburg appeared first on Ramon Thomas Blog.

Let’s talk about something that is keeping child safety experts up at night — and probably should be keeping you up too. As a parent, you already worry about social media and short video apps your children are using. However, we now explore how AI is changing online safety for kids.

In January 2026, the United Nations issued a stark warning: AI is escalating threats to children online at a pace that governments, schools, and parents are simply not prepared for. The Childlight Global Child Safety Institute found that technology-facilitated child abuse cases in the United States jumped from 4,700 in 2023 to more than 67,000 in 2024 — a 1,325% increase driven largely by AI-generated deepfake content. That’s not a typo. That’s a crisis. It is how AI is changing online safety for kids.

Here’s the thing: when most of us think about “online safety,” we picture a stranger in a chat room or a nasty comment on Instagram. But AI has changed the threat landscape entirely. Predators now use AI tools to analyse a child’s online behaviour — their interests, emotional vulnerabilities, even their posting patterns — to craft personalised grooming strategies. It’s frighteningly surgical.

The New AI Threat Landscape for Kids

Traditional online safety warnings focused on what your child might click on. AI has moved the threat upstream. Offenders can now generate photorealistic fake images of real children using just a few social media photos. They can clone voices to impersonate someone a child trusts. They can build chatbots designed to emotionally manipulate young people. There are almost no ways that AI companies can completely control how their apps are used to exploit the vulnerable in society, especially children.

In 2025 alone, the Internet Watch Foundation reported a 26,362% year-over-year increase in AI-generated videos showing child sexual abuse, and 65% were classified in the most severe legal category. Meanwhile, the NCMEC CyberTipline received more than 1.5 million tips linked to AI-generated child sexual exploitation, an over 2,000% increase from 2024.

The question isn’t whether your child could be exposed to AI-related online harm. At these numbers, the question is how we arm our families to recognise and resist it. Alphabet (Google’s owner) has embedded its Gemini AI into its apps, including Google Search, Gmail, and YouTube. So your family is being forced to use AI, whether they like it or not.

What Parents Can Do Right Now: How AI Is Changing Online Safety for Kids

1. Have the conversation with your family. Most children have no idea that the “friend” they met online could be an AI persona built to manipulate them. Teach your kids that AI can fake voices, faces, and even entire relationships.
2. Review your family’s privacy settings across every platform. A predator can’t build a fake image from a photo that doesn’t exist online.
3. Install monitoring tools — not to spy, but to maintain awareness. Apps like Bark alert parents to concerning patterns without reading every message. Read the app reviews before installing one you want to test with your family.

The UN’s advice is clear: digital literacy for children and generative AI literacy for parents are no longer optional — they’re essential life skills. We wouldn’t send our kids into a dangerous neighbourhood without some preparation. The internet in 2025 is that neighbourhood.

Book Suggestion

Raising Humans in a Digital World by Diana Graber (2019) — a practical, research-backed guide that every parent of a school-age child should own. This book is easy to understand, clearly organised, and full of meaningful activities to help parents and teachers connect with their kids. It will equip you with the tools to help your kids build a healthy relationship with technology. Diana Graber is a teacher (and media literacy expert) who is passionate about helping kids understand the impact of their digital reputations.

She looks at technology through a positive lens, stating that the reason for teaching children to connect critically and confidently online is for them to use digital technology to learn, inspire, be inspired, and share their unique talents with the world. Parents must talk with their kids about technology use today and make decisions together about how the family might improve their “digital diets” going forward.

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A Reset, Not a Punishment

Before I walk you through this plan, I want to be direct about what it is and what it is not. It is not a detox. It is not a punishment. It is not a cold-turkey withdrawal that will leave your child anxious and your home tense for a week. It is a gentle, structured reset — a week of intentional choices that interrupts the automatic loop of picking up the phone and opening YouTube. It replaces it with something your family builds together.

I have seen this kind of approach work. Not because it is magic, but because it is honest about what addiction requires: not just removal of the addictive behaviour, but active replacement with something meaningful. The seven days below are a scaffold you can adapt to your family, your children’s ages, and your circumstances. The goal at the end of the week is not a YouTube-free family. It is a family that has developed enough intentional habits to make YouTube one choice among many, rather than the automatic default.

7-Day Plan Break Your Child’s YouTube Habit

Days 1 and 2: Observe and Communicate

On Day 1, do not change anything. Simply pay close attention to your child’s screen habits for the whole day and write down what you observe — when they pick up the phone, for how long, what they are watching, and how they seem emotionally after each session. On Day 2, have a calm, curious conversation about what you observed. Do not frame it as a problem yet. Ask: “I noticed you were on YouTube for a long time yesterday — what were you watching?” “Do you ever feel like you’ve been watching for too long?” “Is there anything you wish you had more time for?”

This two-day foundation is not wasted time. It is essential. Children who feel heard and understood before a change is imposed are far more likely to engage with it. You are gathering information and building trust at the same time. That combination is more powerful than any rule.

Days 3 and 4: Introduce One New Habit

On Day 3, introduce a single, non-negotiable screen-free activity as a family. It should be something enjoyable, not educational in a heavy-handed way. Cook a meal together. Play a card game. Go for a walk. Visit a relative. Kick a ball in the yard. The activity matters less than the fact that you are all present and the phones are put away. On Day 4, introduce the charging station rule: from a fixed time each evening, all phones — including yours — charge in the kitchen or lounge, not in bedrooms.

These two changes alone — one shared offline activity and a phone-free bedroom from a specific hour — produce measurable improvements in sleep quality and family communication within days. They are not dramatic. They do not require confrontation. But they begin reshaping the daily rhythm of your home.

Days 5, 6, and 7: Replace, Review, and Rebuild

On Day 5, give your child a creative challenge — something to make or do with their hands, mind, or body. It can be as simple as drawing their favourite YouTube creator, writing a short paragraph about what they wish existed on YouTube, or building something from materials at home—the act of creating changes the relationship with consuming. On Day 6, review the week as a family. What was hard? What surprised everyone? What felt good? Make this a genuine conversation, not a debrief where you deliver verdicts.

On Day 7, sit down with your child and together design the new screen time agreement from now on. Include them in setting the hours, the charging routine, and the replacement activities. Write it down somewhere visible. This agreement has weight precisely because your child helped create it. It is not a rule imposed from outside — it is a commitment they have participated in making.

Start the 7-day plan break your child’s YouTube habit this week is not the finish line. It is the beginning of a longer process of building a healthier family relationship with technology. Habits do not change permanently in seven days. But seven days of intentional choices is enough to prove to yourself and your child that change is possible — and that the family you want to be is achievable, one day at a time.

Previous blog in this YouTube series: Why Blocking YouTube Doesn’t Work For Kids

• App suggestion: Install Google FamilyLink to track and manage your child’s screentime for each app, during the school day, after school, weekends and so on.

Here’s a short tutorial on the setup of Google Family Link:

The post 7-Day Plan Break Your Child’s YouTube Habit appeared first on Ramon Thomas Blog.

The Block-and-Bypass Cycle

I have spoken to many parents who have tried app blockers, parental controls, and YouTube restrictions. And most of them describe the same pattern: the block goes up, the child finds a workaround within days — a friend’s phone, a browser loophole, a VPN they found on a classmate’s device — and the problem continues, now with added secrecy and resentment. Blocking apps treats the symptom without touching the underlying cause.

This is not to say that parental controls have no role. They do. But they are a fence, not a foundation. A fence can be useful while you are building something stronger, but it is not the solution itself. Parents who rely solely on technical restrictions often find themselves in an endless game of cat and mouse with a child who is becoming increasingly motivated to hide their screen behaviour. That is worse, not better. This is why blocking YouTube doesn’t work for kids or families.

What the Block Removes — and What It Does Not

When you block YouTube, you remove access to content. But you do not remove your child’s need for stimulation, connection, entertainment, or the relief from boredom that YouTube was providing. The brain does not stop wanting what it has been trained to want just because the source is unavailable. If no alternative is offered, your child will find one — and it may be something you have even less visibility into.

This is why the research on internet addiction consistently points to replacement as the key strategy. You are not just removing a habit. You are competing with a habit that has been delivering real rewards — social connection through content creators they feel close to, entertainment, stress relief, and a sense of control. To win, you need to offer something that can deliver those same rewards more healthily. That is a much bigger task than installing an app blocker, but it is the one that actually works.

The Replacement Strategy That Changes Behaviour

The most powerful shift I have seen in families dealing with YouTube addiction is when children start creating rather than just consuming. This does not mean every child needs to start a YouTube channel. It means finding ways for them to produce something — a drawing, a story, a recipe, a short video for the family, a garden project, or a sport. The act of creation engages the brain in a fundamentally different way than passive consumption. It builds confidence, generates genuine satisfaction, and over time, makes the next video slightly less appealing.

One parent I know — a teacher, like my own sister — began asking her son to show her something useful he had learned from YouTube each week. That one question changed the dynamic entirely. He started watching intentionally rather than passively. He began seeking out tutorial content rather than just entertainment. The hours still needed managing, but the quality of engagement had transformed. This small shift in expectation produced a more significant result than any blocker she had tried.

Building the Home Environment That Makes Change Possible

Ultimately, the goal is to make your home a place where offline life is genuinely more rewarding than online life. This requires investment — of time, attention, and creativity. It means having physical books and games available and accessible. It means eating dinner together without screens, regularly enough that conversation becomes a comfortable habit rather than an awkward exception. It means parents being present and engaged, not just physically in the room but genuinely attentive.

None of this is simple. I do not say it to make parents feel guilty — the pressures on families today are real and considerable. But the evidence is clear: the homes where children develop healthy relationships with technology are the ones where parents have built intentional habits around being together offline. That environment is more powerful than any parental control software ever written.

Previous article in this series: YouTube Screen Time Rules For Children

The post Why Blocking YouTube Doesn’t Work for Kids appeared first on Ramon Thomas Blog.