Happy Thursday. We mostly think of WhatsApp group chats as those rather annoying school ones you get added to without being asked, where everyone loves to have their say!
But group chats are on our children's phones too, and I have seen first hand the bullying that can go on in them.
Well, WhatsApp has some good news for us: parents can now have a say over the group chats their children are in. More on that further down.
The big one this week is age checks.
One big question, answered properly. Then the quick ones.
Is age verification safe?
Is Among Us safe for kids?
What is the best dumb phone for kids?
Is WhatsApp part of the social media ban?
Where these came from: Ahrefs banded search volumes, United States and United Kingdom, measured 6 October 2026. Is age verification safe: over 100 a month in each country, with searches for Discord's and Roblox's age checks each over 10,000 a month in the US · Among Us: over 100 a month in each · Dumb phone for kids: over 1,000 a month in the US · WhatsApp and the ban: over 100 a month, in the UK only
Is age verification safe?
It depends.
It depends what the check keeps. A face estimate done on the phone keeps nothing. An ID photo sent to a person keeps everything.
Discord, the chat app built around gaming communities, started checking the age of every account worldwide on 22 September 2026. Roblox has checked the age of anyone who wants to chat since the start of 2026. Searches for how those two checks work each run at over 10,000 a month in the United States alone, on our measurements, and most of them come down to the same worry: what happens to my child's face, or my ID, once it goes in?
The one that asks for nothing. Discord says more than nine in ten accounts are sorted into adult or teen by a model that looks at how old the account is, which servers it joins and how active it is. Discord says the model does not read messages or calls. Nothing new is collected, because it works from what Discord already holds.
The face estimate. A camera looks at your child and software guesses an age range. On Discord the video selfie is processed on the phone itself. On Roblox it goes to Persona, a company that checks identities for other businesses, and Roblox says the images are deleted once the estimate is made. Yoti, which sells the same kind of check to other platforms, says on its own figures that it puts 99.3% of 13 to 17 year olds under 21, and is out by 1.3 years on average for that age group.
The ID document. A passport or driving licence, photographed and checked. This is the one that has gone wrong, and it is this week's number, below.
The automatic check worked. The leak came from the route for when it didn't: a human reviewer, holding documents. Discord says it has since stopped manual review, and that its partners now hand back an age group and delete everything else. We haven't found anyone independent who has checked that deletion, at Discord or at Roblox. For now it is the companies' word.
Safe has a second meaning for a parent: does the check put your child in the right place? An average error of 1.3 years barely matters when the line is 18. It matters when the line is 13 or 16, and those are the lines for children. On Roblox the age group decides who your child can chat to, so a 12-year-old read as 14 lands among older players. The checks can also be got round, which is this week's backdoor, below.
So when an app asks your child to prove their age, the thing to ask back is what it keeps. An age range shared from the app store your phone already uses, or a selfie processed on the phone, leaves nothing new behind. An ID upload is the one to think twice about, and the one to watch for if your child is asked to appeal a decision. If an app has got your child's age wrong, look first at whether you can fix it from your own parent account before anyone sends a passport.
Discord, Safer for Teens, Same Discord for Adults, 22 September 2026 · The Next Web, September 2026 · Roblox Newsroom, 19 November 2025 · Yoti, age estimation white paper · TechCrunch, 9 October 2025 · Ahrefs keyword generator, United States, measured 6 October 2026 · checked 8 October 2026
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What your children are searching for
how to bypass roblox age verification
Over 100 searches a month in the United States. Of the 19 most-asked questions about age verification there, nine are about getting round it.
We can't tell you who is typing them. Several name adult sites, where adults are checked as well. This one names Roblox, the games platform, where nearly three-quarters of the people who had completed an age check by 31 January 2026 were under 18, on Roblox's own figures.
Two ways round Roblox's face estimate are on the record. Accounts that had already passed the check were listed for sale on eBay, and taken down. And in July 2026 researchers found that stubble drawn digitally onto a face turned up to 61% of correct “too young” results into passes on the age-estimation models they tested, which did not include Roblox's.
The check can be put right from your side. A parent with a linked account can change their child's birthday in Parental Controls after the face estimate has been done.
Ahrefs keyword generator, questions, United States, banded monthly volumes, measured 6 October 2026 · Roblox Newsroom, 19 November 2025 · TechCrunch, 6 February 2026 · Sarridis, Kompatsiaris and Papadopoulos, Information Technologies Institute, July 2026 · checked 6 October 2026
Is Among Us safe for kids?
AGE 7 TO 10+
It depends who you ask. PEGI, the European games ratings board, says 7. Apple's App Store says 9+. The ESRB, the ratings board for the US and Canada, says 10 and over. The game asks for a date of birth and checks nothing.
Yes, if the date of birth is true.
Among Us is an online game for up to 15 players who have to work out which of them is the impostor. A player who enters an age under 13 is held to Quick Chat, a fixed list of phrases, and a random name, until a parent approves more by email. The age is whatever your child types and public games are open to strangers, so the protection holds only with the real date and a private game joined by code.
Innersloth (the developer), Info on Accounts, 24 March 2021 · Hwb, Welsh Government, updated 26 March 2026 · Internet Matters, updated 7 July 2026 · ESRB rating summary — checked 6 October 2026
What is the best dumb phone for kids?
There isn't one. There are three kinds.
For calls from home, Tin Can is a wifi landline with no screen and no texting that connects only to the people you approve; it is on sale in the US, Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand. For a phone that leaves the house, Freckle is a children's mobile with calls, texts to approved contacts and location tracking but no browser or app store; its first batch ships in December 2026, in the US only. And for the iPhone in a drawer, which is what most of the questions we measured were about, Apple's Assistive Access shrinks it to the apps you choose behind a passcode, though Apple built it for people with cognitive disabilities and not as a parental control.
Tin Can, product page · Freckle, freckle.tech; Dezeen, 1 October 2026 · Apple Support, Assistive Access User Guide · Ahrefs keyword generator, United States and United Kingdom, measured 6 October 2026 — checked 6 October 2026
AGE 13+
WhatsApp's own minimum, set in its terms of service. Under that age, a parent can open a parent-managed account where WhatsApp offers one.
No, in the two countries that have said.
The question is coming from the UK, where the government's plan for an under-16 ban names six platforms and says messaging services like WhatsApp are not intended to be included. Australia, whose ban has been in force since 10 December 2025, left it out too: the regulator lists WhatsApp among the services it does not consider age-restricted. Every country writes its own list, and we haven't been able to confirm the others.
GOV.UK fact sheet, updated 18 September 2026 · eSafety Commissioner, updated 16 September 2026 · WhatsApp Terms of Service — checked 6 October 2026
Not one of this week's searches
ChatGPT's teen version, tested
Common Sense Media rates it an “unacceptable risk” and wants OpenAI to keep ChatGPT to adults until the gaps are fixed.
Common Sense Media, a US charity that rates children's media and technology, ran about 4,000 conversations with the teen version of ChatGPT that OpenAI launched on 18 August, with testers posing as teenagers. Parents with linked accounts got no alerts. Messages about finding a blade and cutting raised no alarm. The study mode meant to stop it doing homework for them can be switched off with one button. And it found ChatGPT can't reliably tell how old the person typing is, which is the check the teen version depends on. OpenAI disputes the testing and says technical errors stopped the parent alerts from firing.
Common Sense Media, via Education Week, 7 October 2026 · Bloomberg, 7 October 2026 · checked 8 October 2026
New York says some young users were given a version that did nothing.
Algo Refresh is meant to clear a TikTok feed of content a user doesn't want to see. A court complaint from New York's attorney general, made public this week, says that in tests in 2023 some teenagers and children were given versions that didn't work: they pressed it and their feeds stayed the same, while TikTok compared how long each group stayed on the app and what that did to its advertising revenue. TikTok says the claims mischaracterise how the feature works.
New York Attorney General v TikTok, amended complaint, via Reuters, 7 October 2026 · checked 8 October 2026
People whose government ID photos may have been exposed when a company handling Discord's age appeals was breached in 2025.
The photos had been sent in by people who thought the automatic check had got their age wrong and asked for a person to look again.
TechCrunch, 9 October 2025 · Discord, Safer for Teens, Same Discord for Adults, 22 September 2026
| From the tracker | ||||
| Social media bans for children are now law, in progress or under active consideration in 48 countries and regions. | ||||
| Correct as at 8 October 2026 | ||||
| ||||
| What changed this week | ||||
| New Philippines Joins as a bill in progress Both houses of Congress have backed age limits: the Senate for under-16s, the House for under-13s, with parents' consent up to 17. | ||||
| Updated Greece, Austria, Denmark, New Zealand Bills in progress → Proposed None of them has a bill before parliament right now. New Zealand's lapsed when Parliament was dissolved for the election. | ||||
| Updated Slovakia Bills in progress Its bill passed a first vote on 6 October. It would set 16 as the minimum age for an account, from 2027. | ||||
| See the full tracker → |
| What's supposed to happen next? | |
| Late Oct | India. The Supreme Court is due back on whether under-18s should be barred from opening accounts. |
| 1 Nov | Turkey. Its under-15 law takes effect. |
| 7 Nov | New Zealand. The election decides whether the under-16 bill comes back. |
| December | Cyprus. A bill setting 15 as the minimum age is due in parliament. |
| By 31 Dec | UK. The rules for its under-16 ban are due, ahead of a start in spring 2027. |
New on the site: our app scorecard rates 22 apps on seven safety measures and gives the age we'd recommend for each. See the scorecard →
On 30 September, WhatsApp added parental controls for teenagers' accounts.
Why it helps. Most of what goes wrong for children on WhatsApp happens in groups, and most groups start as something ordinary: a class, a team, a year group. Until now, anyone with your child's number could add them to one, and a group could grow from a dozen classmates to a few hundred people your child has never met without anyone at home knowing. Now you hear when your child joins or leaves a group, and again when a group reaches 30, 100 and 250 members, which is an easy moment to ask who's in it now. Your child could always change who can add them to groups. What's new is that the setting stays where you put it unless you enter your PIN.
A parent can now decide who sees their teenager's profile photo, who can add them to groups, whether they can use Channels, which are WhatsApp's broadcast feeds, and how strict Meta AI, the chatbot built into the app, is with them.
What it doesn't do. It is optional. A parent sees no messages and hears no calls: WhatsApp says they “stay private and protected by end-to-end encryption”. And the announcement doesn't say when every family will have it.
WhatsApp Blog, New Controls to Help Parents Guide Their Teens on WhatsApp, 30 September 2026 · TechCrunch, September 2026 · checked 8 October 2026
If your child has been asked to prove their age this week, hit reply and tell me which app asked and how. I really do read every one.
Heidi
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