The digital landscape presents unprecedented challenges for children’s online safety, with research indicating that minors face constant exposure to intrusive advertising, malicious content distribution through compromised ads (malvertising), and sophisticated tracking mechanisms designed to extract and monetize their personal data. This comprehensive report examines the ecosystem of ad and tracker blocking technologies, parental control systems, regulatory frameworks, and privacy-by-design principles that work collectively to create cleaner browsing experiences for children by default. The analysis reveals that effective protection requires a multi-layered approach combining browser-level filtering, device-level parental controls, network-level DNS filtering, legal mandates establishing default privacy settings, and cultural shifts toward treating children’s safety as a design imperative rather than an afterthought. Recent developments in 2024 and 2025 demonstrate accelerating momentum toward these protective mechanisms, particularly through state-level legislation expanding age-appropriate design codes and federal initiatives strengthening enforcement of children’s privacy protections, though significant challenges remain regarding age verification, balancing protection with accessibility, and preventing circumvention by motivated users.
Understanding the Problem: Why Cleaner Browsing Matters for Children
The internet presents fundamental challenges to child safety that have become increasingly sophisticated in recent years. The main benefits of blocking ads and trackers for young users boil down to limiting the amount of data collected about them and improving their security, with additional benefits including reduced cognitive burden from visual clutter and decreased vulnerability to manipulative design patterns. Children are particularly vulnerable to online advertising because they lack the cognitive development necessary to recognize persuasive intent and distinguish between commercial and editorial content. Research demonstrates that children under thirteen lack the cognitive ability to recognize the persuasive and biased nature of advertising information, leading them to accept marketing messages as true and accurate without critical evaluation. This vulnerability increases when children encounter increasingly sophisticated digital marketing techniques, including behavioral targeting based on extensive data collection, sponsored content embedded within entertainment, and algorithmic feeds designed specifically to maximize engagement regardless of developmental appropriateness.
The threats children face online extend well beyond traditional advertising annoyances. Trackers embedded in targeted advertisements collect extensive personal data about young users, including personal identifiable information such as age and gender, IP addresses, specific location data, device information including operating system and version numbers, browser settings, browsing habits, timezone settings, and other behavioral markers. These data points, accumulated over time and across multiple platforms and devices, paint increasingly detailed pictures of individual children that enable harmful targeting practices, price discrimination, manipulation, and potential exploitation. Location data reveals places children go, message metadata reveals communication patterns and contacts, browsing data indicates interests and behaviors, tracked and logged searches reveal information children are seeking, and invasive analytics show how children interact with applications and services. More concerningly, fingerprinting techniques create unique identifiers for devices that enable tracking even when users attempt to clear cookies or use private browsing modes, creating persistent tracking identities that follow children across the web.
The economic incentives driving aggressive data collection from children are substantial and well-documented. Advertisers invest billions in child-targeted marketing, with United States expenditures on kids’ advertising estimated at $2.9 billion in 2021 and projected to reach $21.1 billion by 2031. By the time young people reach age twenty-one, they will have been exposed to over one million advertisements, many employing sophisticated psychological techniques designed to bypass developing brains. Research from the American Psychological Association demonstrates that children can recall advertising content after just one exposure and express desire for advertised products, even when those products are not developmentally appropriate or in children’s best interests. Beyond financial manipulation, advertising and algorithmic content delivery systems have been directly implicated in mental health crises affecting young people, with research demonstrating that adolescents spending more than three hours daily on social media face double the risk of anxiety and depression symptoms, and average daily use among teenagers has reached 4.8 hours.
Technological Foundations: How Ad and Tracker Blocking Works
To understand how children’s browsing can be made cleaner by default, one must first comprehend the technical mechanisms through which ads and trackers function, and subsequently how filtering systems intercept and prevent them. Advertisements typically arrive at users through complex programmatic advertising ecosystems involving multiple intermediaries, with embedded tracking mechanisms—most commonly tracking pixels—collecting behavioral data about users as they navigate the web. These tracking mechanisms collect different types of data through different technical implementations, ranging from simple cookie-based identification to more sophisticated device fingerprinting approaches that create persistent identifiers without requiring stored data.
Browser-based ad and tracker blocking operates through several distinct technical approaches, each with different capabilities and trade-offs. The traditional approach employed by extensions like uBlock Origin, which is considered the gold standard for blocking ads and trackers within browsers, uses filter lists containing pattern-matching rules that identify and block requests to known advertising and tracking servers. These systems maintain extensive blocklists updated regularly by community contributors, with popular lists like EasyList containing tens of thousands of filtering rules designed to intercept requests before resources load. The implementation works by intercepting browser requests at the network layer, comparing requested URLs against blocklists, and preventing matching requests from completing, which stops both the advertisement from displaying and the tracking payload from executing. This approach is remarkably effective because it works without requiring knowledge of a user’s browsing behavior or maintaining user profiles—it simply prevents certain categories of content from loading based on known classifications.
More sophisticated filtering approaches employ machine learning and context-aware analysis to identify suspicious or manipulative content beyond what simple pattern matching can detect. However, these approaches face technical limitations, particularly as browser vendors implement architectural changes that restrict extension capabilities. The introduction of Manifest V3 in Chromium-based browsers represents a significant technical challenge to traditional ad blocking, as it limits the webRequest API that extensions rely upon and introduces rule limits that prevent comprehensive filtering. The declarativeNetRequest API proposed as a replacement has insufficient capabilities for full-featured ad blocking, particularly regarding support for complex filter options used by EasyList and other comprehensive blocking mechanisms. Security software relying on dynamic blocking capabilities for purposes including but not limited to parental control functions—protecting child users from content categorized as harmful or unwanted—faces particular challenges under these architectural constraints.
Network-level filtering provides an alternative technical approach to ad and tracker blocking that operates at a different layer of the internet stack. DNS filtering services like CleanBrowsing intercept DNS requests—the system through which domain names are converted to IP addresses—and block access to known problematic sites by simply refusing to resolve those domain names. This approach operates at the network level rather than the browser level, meaning it protects all devices connected to a network regardless of which browser they use. CleanBrowsing provides multiple filtering profiles including a Family Filter that blocks all adult content, enforces SafeSearch on search engines, restricts YouTube features, and blocks mixed-content sites containing both appropriate and inappropriate material. DNS filtering operates by maintaining categorized databases of websites and consulting these databases whenever a device attempts to access a domain, then returning an error message stating the site does not exist rather than providing the requested connection.
Local content filtering represents another approach where blocklists are stored and processed locally on users’ devices rather than relying on remote servers or browser extensions. LocalCDN provides one example of this approach, locally intercepting content served by content delivery networks (CDNs) to replace them with cached alternatives. This approach addresses privacy concerns associated with CDN-based content delivery, where third-party content delivery providers have visibility into what content users are accessing, and may themselves engage in tracking practices. By intercepting these requests locally, LocalCDN prevents CDNs from knowing what content was accessed while also potentially improving performance through local caching.
Browser-Level Solutions: Building Clean Browsing Into Default Experiences
Because most people spend substantial portions of their time using web browsers, blocking ads at the browser level proves crucial for creating meaningful improvements in privacy and providing a defense against malvertising threats. Modern browsers increasingly include built-in protections by default, moving away from models where users must actively install extensions to achieve protection. The default settings paradigm represents a crucial shift, as research in behavioral economics demonstrates that default options exercise substantial influence over user choices, and extremely high percentages of users never change default settings even when alternatives are available.
Brave represents a comprehensive example of this browser-level approach, offering “Chrome on anti-tracking steroids” by building ad blocking, tracker blocking, cookie isolation, fingerprinting protection, and enhanced security features directly into the browser without requiring any extensions. Brave blocks third-party ads on every website by default, including video ads, search ads, and social media ads, and also blocks the “Accept cookies?” pop-ups that clutter modern web experiences. This built-in approach provides exceptional protection without requiring users to understand technical concepts or navigate extension marketplaces. For users prioritizing privacy, Brave’s approach of blocking tracker requests locally on the device rather than sending URLs to Google’s servers represents a meaningful privacy improvement over Chrome’s Safe Browsing feature. Brave’s protection extends to fingerprinting prevention through what it terms “privacy through randomization,” where browser configuration information is randomized to prevent creation of unique device identifiers that persist across sites.
Firefox offers flexible options for safe browsing through its Enhanced Tracking Protection feature, available at different protection levels including a Strict level that prevents known and suspected fingerprinting in addition to blocking cross-site cookies and tracking content. Firefox rolls out Total Cookie Protection by default to all users worldwide, confining cookies to the site where they were created and preventing tracking companies from using these cookies to track browsing across multiple sites. This approach creates separate “cookie jars” for each website visited, preventing trackers from linking behavior across sites while still allowing cookies to fulfill less invasive functions like providing analytics. Firefox demonstrates a balanced approach to privacy that avoids breaking websites while providing strong protections against the most privacy-invasive practices.
Safari on Apple devices includes built-in parental controls and content filtering capabilities integrated into the Screen Time feature. Parents can turn on content restrictions for Safari, limit adult websites, manually block specific sites, and prevent private browsing mode from functioning. These controls operate at the device level, applying to all browsers and apps on the device, creating comprehensive protection across the entire digital environment. AppleID-managed child accounts automatically enforce SafeSearch and prevent access to age-inappropriate content across Apple services.
Google Chrome provides SafeSearch functionality that filters explicit content from search results when enabled, available through settings at Google.com. Chrome offers supervised accounts enabling parents to manage browsing activity and block specific websites, along with Enhanced Safe Browsing protection to warn about dangerous websites and downloads. However, Chrome’s approach to privacy raises concerns among privacy advocates, as it maintains extensive telemetry collection by default and provides limited granular control compared to privacy-focused browsers. Google’s approach of building limited ad blocking into Chrome specifically blocks only the most egregiously intrusive ad formats defined by the Coalition for Better Ads—formats like pop-ups, auto-playing video ads with sound, and pre-stitial ads with countdown timers—while allowing most advertising to continue, which some commentators interpret as designed to prevent users from installing more comprehensive ad blocking extensions while preserving Google’s own ad business.
Microsoft Edge integrates Family Safety features allowing parents to manage their child’s browsing activity, block websites, and set screen time limits through Family.microsoft.com. Edge provides SafeSearch filtering and SmartScreen protection blocking dangerous and malicious websites. However, Edge’s approach similarly reflects browser vendor interests in balancing comprehensive protection with business models dependent on advertising revenue and data collection.
Comprehensive Parental Control Systems and Device Management
While browser-level protections provide important foundational security, comprehensive child safety requires device-level and account-level systems that parents can configure to match their family’s specific needs and developmental stages. These systems typically provide time management, content filtering, app controls, location tracking, and detailed activity monitoring across all applications and services on a child’s device.
Google Family Link represents a major platform vendor’s comprehensive approach to child account management, allowing parents to set daily screen time limits, set device bedtimes, remotely lock Android and Chrome OS devices, approve or decline app downloads and in-app purchases, manage website access through Chrome browser controls, and filter explicit search results through SafeSearch. Family Link provides app activity reports showing which apps children use most, enabling parents to make informed decisions about content and screen time allocation based on actual usage patterns rather than assumptions. Parents can view their child’s device location, reset passwords, edit personal information, manage Google Assistant access, and delete accounts through the Family Link interface. SafeSearch is automatically enabled by default for all signed-in users under thirteen with Family Link-managed accounts, representing a default privacy setting that provides baseline protection without requiring parental configuration.
Apple Screen Time provides similar comprehensive controls for iOS and iPad devices, allowing parents to manage purchases, prevent app installation, restrict built-in app access, prevent explicit content, manage Game Center features, prevent web content access to adult websites, block specific sites, and disable private browsing. Content and Privacy Restrictions create a passcode-protected system where only parents can change restrictions, with default settings calibrated by the child’s age.
Dedicated parental control applications offer more sophisticated monitoring and filtering capabilities than built-in platform controls. Qustodio provides comprehensive parental controls including real-time monitoring of children’s online activities across multiple devices, content filtering across 29 different categories, time limits for daily screen time, activity reports showing web activity and app usage, and GPS-based location tracking for mobile devices. The system allows parents to see exactly which sites their children visit and how long they spend on each one, with real-time tracking enabling immediate intervention if children attempt to access inappropriate content.
AirDroid Parental Control achieves the “most comprehensive solution available for parents looking for the best browser protection” according to testing, featuring automatic detection and blocking of inappropriate sites with flexible modes including Whitelist Mode (only approved sites allowed), Blacklist Mode (block specific sites or categories), and Unrestricted Mode (more freedom but with alerts). The system includes content detection scanning devices for explicit or adult images, providing protection beyond web filtering, and generates detailed browsing history reports showing exactly which sites children visit and duration of each visit. What distinguishes AirDroid from other solutions is the balance between powerful filtering and monitoring features that never feel intrusive, respecting the privacy and autonomy of children while providing parents meaningful oversight.
Bark uses artificial intelligence to monitor children’s online activities including social media across thirty platforms, text messages, emails, and online chats, sending real-time alerts to parents about potential issues such as cyberbullying, inappropriate content, or contact with potential predators. The AI-driven approach enables detection of concerning content even when it uses different linguistic patterns or emerging slang that rule-based systems might miss.
Specialized browsers designed specifically for children take a different approach by curation rather than filtering. KidZui operates as a desktop-only browser using a whitelist system where all content must be pre-approved before becoming accessible, with content organized into kid-friendly categories like science, movies, and games. The closed system prevents sharing of personal information by disabling direct messaging and chat functionality entirely, though this approach may seem too restrictive for older children. SPIN Safe Browser automatically enforces Restricted Mode on inappropriate videos and includes content filtering, though some users report this can be overly restrictive, blocking even legitimate educational content.
These systems collectively illustrate how parental control has evolved from simple website blocking into comprehensive digital environment management systems that provide parents meaningful tools to guide their children’s online experiences according to developmental stage and family values.
Legal and Regulatory Frameworks: Making Protection Mandatory
Recent years have witnessed explosive growth in legal and regulatory efforts to mandate cleaner browsing experiences for children by default, particularly through age-appropriate design codes that treat children’s privacy and safety as design requirements rather than optional features. This regulatory momentum reflects widespread recognition that market forces alone have failed to incentivize adequate child protection, and that explicit legal mandates are necessary to change industry practices.
The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), effective since April 2000, applies to online collection of personal information by companies under U.S. jurisdiction about children under thirteen years of age. COPPA requires operators of websites and apps to provide privacy policies explaining their data practices, verify parental consent before collecting children’s personal information, and restrict use of that information. COPPA 2.0 and Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) have both passed the Senate with overwhelming bipartisan support (91-3 vote on July 30, 2024) and would extend protections to minors under seventeen, though these bills had not yet passed the House as of January 2025. The new rules finalized by the FTC implement COPPA by requiring opt-in consent from parents for both collecting children’s personal data and sharing that data for behavioral advertising purposes, with the new double opt-in requirement giving parents greater control over whether their kids’ data is disclosed to third parties.
Key standards include prioritizing best interests of the child as primary consideration in service design, conducting data protection impact assessments for risky operations involving children’s data, ensuring age-appropriate application of services by identifying and tailoring services to individual user age, providing transparent explanations of data use in language appropriate to developmental stage, prohibiting clearly detrimental or unlawful uses of children’s data, and setting high-privacy default settings unless compelling reasons justify alternatives. The UK Code has influenced legislation across multiple U.S. states and internationally, with similar approaches being considered as standards for responsible digital service design globally.
California’s Age-Appropriate Design Code Act mandates that online services likely to be accessed by children under eighteen prioritize their well-being and privacy, require businesses to assess and mitigate risks from harmful content and exploitative design features, and prohibit collection, use, and sale of children’s data except where strictly necessary. The law extends coverage to age eighteen rather than just thirteen under COPPA, and defines coverage broadly as services “likely to be accessed by children” rather than requiring child-directed intent, potentially capturing most online services. Though initially subject to preliminary injunction by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, the injunction on data protection impact assessment provisions was upheld while restrictions on data collection and geolocation provisions were allowed to proceed.
Connecticut’s Consumer Data Privacy Act amendments effective October 1, 2024 include provisions for children under eighteen, requiring companies to complete data protection impact assessments for each product likely to be accessed by children and exercise reasonable care to avoid heightened risk of harm to minors, with requirements to delete minors’ accounts and data upon request. Maryland’s Kids Code effective October 1, 2024 requires social media platforms to implement default privacy settings for children, prohibits collecting minors’ precise locations, and requires data protection impact assessments. Vermont, Connecticut, Montana, and Nebraska have enacted or are implementing age-appropriate design code laws with common provisions including requirement for high-privacy default settings, restrictions on geolocation data collection, prohibitions on design features that increase compulsive usage (like infinite scroll and algorithmic feeds), requirements for data protection assessments, restrictions on data sales and targeted advertising, and prohibitions on “dark patterns” that manipulate consent.
App Store Accountability Laws represent a new frontier in child protection, with Utah enacting the country’s first state law requiring app store providers to verify all users’ age and obtain verifiable parental consent before minors download apps, make in-app purchases, or download content. Texas and Louisiana have enacted similar app store laws set to take effect in 2026, all imposing similar obligations on app store providers and app developers to verify age and obtain parental consent for minor users. These laws address the particular vulnerability of children to in-app purchases and subscription traps by making parental verification a mandatory step rather than optional control.
New York’s Stop Addictive Feeds Exploitation (SAFE) for Kids Act prohibits social media platforms from providing minors with addictive algorithmic feeds—defined as using data to personalize content delivery to create endless streams designed to encourage continued use—without parental consent. The law recognizes that algorithmically personalized feeds exploit developing brains through techniques that keep minors scrolling at unsafe levels, and are linked to depression, anxiety, eating disorders, and sleep disorders. The SAFE for Kids Act requires platforms to show chronologically-ordered content by default to users under eighteen rather than algorithmic feeds, though minors can request parental consent for algorithmic feeds if they choose.
Advertising Restrictions and Content Standards increasingly regulate how companies market to children. The Children’s Advertising Review Unit (CARU) sets forth specific guidelines for ads in children’s television, publications, and websites directed to children, requiring that claims be narrowly tailored and very clear in language children can understand, without preying on potential vulnerability or naiveté. Advertising standards stipulate that marketing targeted at or featuring children should not contain anything likely to result in physical, mental, or moral harm, and must not exploit their credulity, loyalty, vulnerability, or lack of experience. Advertisers must depict products realistically, avoid suggesting products will make children more popular or stronger, and avoid calls to action promoting false urgency.
UK GDPR and European data protection law establish that children’s personal data merit specific protection, particularly regarding use for marketing and profiling purposes. Article 8 of GDPR specifies that for children below age sixteen, processing shall be lawful only if consent is given or authorized by parents (or lower age of thirteen if member states allow). The law requires that companies make reasonable efforts to verify parental consent using available technology.
These regulatory frameworks collectively represent a fundamental shift in how legal systems conceptualize child protection online, moving from reactive responses to specific harms toward proactive design mandates requiring companies to build protection into products by default.
Privacy-by-Default Design: Making Clean Browsing the Norm
A core principle emerging from both regulatory frameworks and thoughtful product design is that privacy and clean browsing should be achieved through well-designed defaults rather than requiring users to make active choices or install additional software. Default settings exercise remarkable power over user behavior, with research demonstrating that extremely high percentages of users never modify default configurations even when alternatives are available. This principle has profound implications for children’s safety, as young users cannot be expected to understand complex privacy settings or make sophisticated choices about their digital environment.
High-privacy defaults represent a practical implementation of this principle, with Vermont and Nebraska requiring covered platforms to establish default privacy settings for minor users at the highest protection available. These defaults include disabling search engine indexing of minors’ account profiles, prohibiting push notifications during specified times, restricting access to comment functions, disabling direct messaging, and preventing features designed to increase platform engagement. Rather than assuming privacy is important and asking users to opt in to protection, these defaults assume protection is important and require explicit opt-out for users choosing different settings.
Location History represents another domain where privacy defaults matter significantly for children. Google now keeps Location History off by default for all accounts, and children with supervised accounts don’t have the option of turning Location History on at all, taking privacy protection a step further than mere defaults. Google’s approach reflects recognition that location data presents particular risks for children, and that allowing location tracking as optional feature undermines meaningful protection.
SafeSearch filtering on major search engines now defaults to enabled for signed-in users under eighteen on Google platforms, while not previously enabled by default. This approach means children using Google search through Family Link accounts automatically receive filtered results without their parents or guardians needing to explicitly enable this setting. YouTube implements similar default protections for young users, changing default upload settings to the most private option available for teens ages thirteen to seventeen. These defaults represent a shift toward treating content protection and privacy as standard expectations rather than optional add-ons.
Restricted Mode on YouTube, which filters out potentially objectionable content, is now enabled by default for users under eighteen in many contexts. This represents another instance of default settings providing baseline protection without requiring active user intervention or parental configuration.
The principle of privacy-by-default operates in tension with user choice and autonomy, particularly for older children developing digital literacy. Some frameworks try to balance these concerns through what researchers term “graduated defaults” where default settings vary by age or developmental stage, with younger children receiving more restrictive defaults and older teens receiving gradually more permissive options as they demonstrate digital maturity. However, implementing such age-graduated systems requires accurate age verification, which presents significant implementation challenges and privacy concerns.
Implementation Challenges: Age Verification, Privacy Tensions, and Technical Limitations
Despite widespread recognition of the need for cleaner browsing defaults for children, significant practical challenges impede implementation. The most fundamental challenge involves accurately determining a user’s age without requiring invasive personal data collection that itself threatens privacy. Effective implementation of age-appropriate protections requires knowing whether users are children, but various methods of determining age involve different privacy risks and technical limitations.
Age Verification Methods vary along a spectrum from self-reported age to invasive biometric authentication. Self-reported age proves unreliable, as children readily misrepresent their age to access services, with research showing children as young as ten to fourteen routinely misstate their age online. Document-based verification requiring government identification creates risks of identity theft and significant data breaches if compromised. Third-party age assurance vendors analyze signals including payment methods, online behavior patterns, and cross-database checking, but these approaches raise privacy concerns and may themselves collect and retain sensitive data. Biometric verification through facial recognition presents particular concerns for children, as it creates persistent digital biometric records that could be retained indefinitely and misused. These tensions mean that virtually any age verification approach involves trade-offs between protection and privacy, with no universally acceptable solution that simultaneously achieves robust age verification and meaningful privacy protection.
The Parental Consent Bottleneck represents another implementation challenge, particularly regarding verifiable parental consent requirements. Researchers have noted that many websites have responded to COPPA requirements not by implementing careful parental consent procedures but by simply excluding children entirely from their services, which has the effect of creating a less open internet where services once freely available to all are now inaccessible to young users. This demonstrates the “parental consent paradox” where requirements intended to protect children sometimes instead restrict children’s access to beneficial content and services. Ensuring that parental consent procedures are neither so burdensome that they effectively exclude children nor so lax that they provide no meaningful protection remains an unresolved implementation challenge.
Technical Limitations of Browser Architecture Changes impede comprehensive ad and tracker blocking, particularly as browser vendors implement architectural shifts that restrict extension capabilities. Chrome’s move toward Manifest V3 and the declarativeNetRequest API eliminates capabilities previously available through webRequest, with rule limits of just thirty thousand rules proving insufficient for comprehensive blocking lists like EasyList which generate forty thousand or more rules. Privacy advocates warn that these architectural changes fundamentally remove user control over filtering web traffic, whereas previous implementations allowed granular filtering while new approaches foreclose advanced filtering capabilities. Defenders of the architecture changes argue the new approach improves browser performance and security rather than specifically targeting ad blockers, though users and developers consistently report the new limitations impede functionality necessary for both ad blocking and parental control functions.
Circumvention Concerns regarding motivated young users who wish to circumvent protective controls present persistent challenges for parental control systems. Children can rename hidden apps to disguise them, use hand-me-down devices outside family oversight, access public Wi-Fi to avoid home network filtering, or use VPNs to circumvent DNS-level blocking. Some parental control features prove vulnerable to VPN bypassing, and many can be circumvented with sufficient technical knowledge. These circumvention concerns are particularly acute with older teens and technically sophisticated children, limiting the effectiveness of controls for precisely the population that most needs guidance but is most capable of bypassing restrictions.
Balancing Protection with Autonomy and Development represents a deeper challenge that technical solutions alone cannot resolve. Children require gradually increasing autonomy and control over their digital environment as they mature and develop digital literacy. Overly restrictive default settings that work for five-year-olds become developmentally inappropriate and counterproductive for fifteen-year-olds, yet implementing systems that provide graduated protection based on actual developmental stage requires accurate age assessment and risks either too-protective or too-permissive settings. Parents reasonably desire guidance from experts about appropriate control levels for different ages, yet children benefit from increasing agency in managing their digital environment.
Business Model Conflicts represent systemic challenges that technical and regulatory approaches alone cannot resolve. The primary business model underlying free online services remains advertising-based revenue, creating systemic incentives to maximize data collection and behavioral targeting precision. When regulation restricts targeted advertising to children, businesses respond by either reducing service quality, implementing subscription fees that exclude lower-income families, showing more but less-effective ads to compensate for reduced targeting precision, or simply exiting markets where complying with regulations proves economically unfeasible. These responses demonstrate that effective child protection requires not just blocking technology and legal mandates, but fundamental rethinking of business models and sustainability approaches for services used by children.
Emerging Trends and Recent Developments in 2025
The year 2025 has witnessed accelerating momentum toward cleaner browsing by default for children, with new legislation, platform policy changes, and technological developments reflecting the urgency of the issue and the recognition that previous approaches have proven insufficient.
Several states have enacted or are implementing comprehensive new protections. Utah enacted the App Store Accountability Act requiring app store providers to verify users’ ages and obtain verifiable parental consent before minors download apps or make purchases, effective May 6, 2026. Illinois, South Carolina, and Vermont are considering bills requiring age-appropriate design codes during their 2025-2026 legislative sessions. California has introduced legislation including AB 1064, the Leading Ethical Development (LEAD) Act, which would require parental consent before using children’s personal information to train AI models and would mandate risk-level assessments classifying AI systems based on potential harm to children.
Google has announced expanded safeguards across its platforms, including preventing age-sensitive ad categories from being shown to teens and blocking ad targeting based on age, gender, location, and interests for users under eighteen. YouTube has announced changing default upload settings to the most private option for teens ages thirteen to seventeen and making SafeSearch technology apply to web browsers on smart displays. Google Assistant is implementing new default protections preventing mature content from surfacing during children’s interactions with shared devices.
Meta announced policy changes in response to ongoing criticism of social media’s effects on child mental health, though critics note these changes should have occurred years ago given the evidence of harms. The regulatory momentum reflected in both KOSA and COPPA 2.0 passing the Senate with ninety-one-to-three votes demonstrates remarkable bipartisan consensus that stronger protections are necessary.
The SAFE for Kids Act in New York represents pioneering legislation specifically addressing addictive algorithmic feeds, with proposed rules outlining how social media companies should confirm users’ age to prevent serving algorithmic feeds to minors. This approach represents a shift from blocking advertising to regulating the psychological design techniques that keep users engaged regardless of their age.
Technical innovations continue advancing blocking capabilities despite architectural constraints. Firefox’s Total Cookie Protection has been rolled out by default to more Firefox users worldwide, making Firefox the most private major browser available by confining cookies to sites where created. This provides comprehensive tracking prevention without relying on maintained block lists of known trackers, instead preventing tracking through architectural design principles.
Comparative Analysis: Different Approaches to Cleaner Browsing
Different stakeholders have adopted different approaches to cleaner browsing, each with distinct advantages and limitations. Browser Vendor Approaches range from privacy-first architectures like Brave and Firefox, to advertising-business-dependent approaches like Chrome, to closed ecosystems like Safari. Privacy-first browsers build protection into core architecture and make clean browsing the default experience without requiring user configuration, but face adoption challenges given Chrome’s market dominance. Advertising-dependent browsers offer protection through selective blocking focused on preserving their own ad business while filtering competitors’ ads, which provides some protection but prioritizes business interests over comprehensive privacy.
Parental Control App Approaches offer comprehensive monitoring and filtering but require installation on devices, rely on user understanding of complex configurations, and may feel intrusive or surveillance-oriented to children. These systems work well for younger children where comprehensive monitoring is appropriate, but become increasingly inappropriate as children mature and develop autonomy.
Device-Level Approaches through built-in parental controls on iOS, Android, and Windows provide comprehensive protection across all applications without requiring third-party installations, but rely on users understanding complex settings and maintaining consistent configurations across devices. These approaches scale well within single-device families but fragment across different device ecosystems when families use multiple operating systems.
Network-Level DNS Filtering provides comprehensive protection regardless of browser or device used, captures traffic across all applications, and works transparently without requiring user awareness or configuration once set up. These approaches work particularly well for households with reliable internet infrastructure where parents control network equipment, but cannot protect children on public Wi-Fi or through cellular networks outside home networks, leaving children unprotected in the environments where risky behavior most commonly occurs.
Regulatory Approaches create legal requirements that platform vendors implement protections, establish baseline standards that apply to entire industries rather than relying on individual adoption, and provide enforcement mechanisms including fines when companies violate protections. However, regulations take years to develop and enforce, leave questions about implementation unanswered during lengthy legislative processes, and may inadvertently harm children by restricting service access or creating additional privacy risks through age verification requirements.
Advertising Industry Standards and self-regulatory approaches like Coalition for Better Ads standards provide rapid implementation without requiring legislative action, but historically have proven insufficient without regulatory pressure, as industry groups prioritize member interests over child welfare. These approaches continue functioning within advertising models rather than questioning whether current models adequately serve children.
These different approaches collectively provide layered protection, with no single approach proving wholly sufficient, but combinations creating meaningful protection when consistently applied across devices, networks, browsers, and services.
Recommendations and Future Directions
To make children’s browsing cleaner by default across all contexts and platforms, sustained effort across multiple domains remains necessary. Technological Innovation should continue developing better approaches to ad and tracker blocking that do not depend on maintaining blocklists of known bad actors, since new tracking domains constantly emerge and evade list-based blocking. Architectural approaches like Firefox’s Total Cookie Protection that make tracking fundamentally harder through design rather than exclusion lists offer promising directions. Browser vendors should prioritize child safety alongside their business models, building robust protection into default configurations rather than selectively filtering only competitors’ ads.
Regulatory Development should continue advancing age-appropriate design codes while simultaneously addressing implementation challenges around age verification and parental consent. Rather than requiring invasive biometric authentication or extensive personal data collection for age verification, regulations should require services to implement available technology proportionate to risks, acknowledging that no perfect age verification exists but practical approaches like payment method analysis provide reasonable confidence without excessive privacy invasiveness. Regulations should explicitly address business model transitions, recognizing that fundamentally changing data collection and advertising practices may require changes to service sustainability models, and may warrant public investment in alternative service models that serve children’s interests rather than advertising interests.
Privacy-by-Default Standards should become universal expectations rather than differentiators, with baseline protections including high-privacy default settings, disabled location history, enabled SafeSearch filtering, chronologically-ordered rather than algorithmic feeds, absence of dark patterns manipulating consent, and transparent data practices understandable to both children and parents. These standards should become table stakes for operating services used by children, with non-compliance generating enforcement action from regulators.
Education and Digital Literacy remains crucial, as protective technologies cannot replace children’s understanding of advertising’s persuasive intent and development of critical thinking about marketing messages. Schools should teach children how advertising works, what data companies collect, and how to identify manipulative design patterns. Parents should be supported through guidance rather than blame, with expert recommendations about appropriate protective settings for different ages and clear explanations of trade-offs between protection and autonomy.
Industry Transformation toward business models not dependent on extracting and monetizing children’s behavioral data offers the most sustainable long-term approach. Whether through subscriptions, subsidized services, publicly-funded offerings, or alternative models, shifting away from advertising-dependent business models for children’s services eliminates the fundamental incentive driving aggressive data collection and behavioral targeting. Some progress appears evident with premium options emerging for children’s services, though cost remains a barrier for lower-income families.
Embracing a Cleaner Digital Landscape for Young Minds
Children’s online browsing has become demonstrably cleaner through accumulating layers of ad and tracker blocking, parental controls, and regulatory frameworks that make protection increasingly default rather than optional. From browser-level filtering through uBlock Origin and built-in protections in Brave and Firefox, to device-level parental controls in iOS, Android, and Windows, to network-level DNS filtering services like CleanBrowsing, to accelerating regulatory frameworks establishing privacy-by-default requirements, the technological and regulatory ecosystem has become substantially more protective than existed just five years ago. Recent regulatory momentum, particularly the overwhelming Senate support for KOSA and COPPA 2.0, combined with state-level adoption of age-appropriate design codes, suggests that legal requirements for cleaner browsing by default will continue increasing.
Yet significant gaps and challenges remain. Age verification continues presenting an unsolved puzzle balancing protection against invasiveness. Technical limitations from browser architectural changes threaten comprehensive blocking capabilities. Business model conflicts between child welfare and advertising revenue persist. Implementation remains fragmented across devices, networks, and services, with children sometimes protected and sometimes vulnerable depending on specific technical and legal circumstances. Balancing protection with children’s developing autonomy and agency continues presenting developmental challenges that technology alone cannot resolve.
The clearest direction forward involves recognizing that sustainable child protection requires coordination across all these domains—technological innovation, regulatory frameworks, platform design practices, parental engagement, educator involvement, and ultimately business model transformation toward sustainability approaches not dependent on children’s behavioral data exploitation. Neither technology alone nor regulation alone suffices; neither parental control nor educational intervention suffices; neither browser-level protection nor network-level protection suffices in isolation. Instead, comprehensive protection emerges from consistently-applied protections across all domains, with high-privacy defaults at every layer creating an environment where clean browsing becomes the norm rather than requiring active effort from parents or children to achieve protection.
The momentum evident in 2024 and 2025 suggests that societies worldwide are reaching consensus that current approaches to child privacy and safety online have proven inadequate, and that fundamental changes to default configurations, business practices, and regulatory frameworks are necessary. Whether this momentum sustains and translates into meaningful improvements in children’s actual experiences online—rather than merely symbolic regulatory action or corporate public relations—remains to be seen. Yet the sheer scale of effort currently being directed toward cleaner browsing by default suggests that meaningful improvements are achievable, provided sustained attention, adequate resources, and commitment to prioritizing child welfare over commercial interests continue characterizing policy and technology development.
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