Individual Services
This distinction is easy to miss: product overview belongs to the employment context, where policy and notice should define its use. It is mentioned here only as a contrast, not as a recommendation for covert family surveillance.
For current, topic-specific guidance alongside this note, the Ofcom website is a useful independent starting point; check its advice against the child’s age and the facts of the situation.
The settings inside each game, video platform and messaging app, which are where the contact risk actually lives and which no external control reaches.
The layers · Analysis
The layers above cover devices and accounts. What happens inside a service is governed by that service's own settings, and those are where the important choices are.
Why this layer matters most
Contact risk lives inside services, not on devices.
A device-level control can block an app entirely and cannot change who may message a child inside it.
Which means the platform's own privacy settings do the work that parents most want done, and they are free, specific and usually buried.
The settings that matter, in any service
Who can message or contact the child: friends only, nobody, or everybody, which is frequently the default.
Whether the profile is discoverable by search, phone number or contacts.
Whether location is shared, with whom, and whether it is on by default.
Whether content is visible publicly or to a defined circle.
And whether voice or video chat with strangers is possible, which in games is where the most serious contact risk sits.
Five questions, asked of every service the child uses.
Games specifically
Open voice chat with strangers is common and is the single highest-risk feature in most children's games.
It can usually be limited to friends or disabled entirely, and doing so costs the child very little at younger ages.
User-generated content inside games means the rating on the store is describing the platform rather than what is in it.
And friend requests from unknown accounts should be a conversation before it is a setting: what to do with one, and that telling you costs nothing.
Video platforms
Autoplay and recommendation are the mechanism that matters, more than any individual video.
A restricted or child-specific mode exists on the major platforms and is substantially better than nothing at younger ages.
It is not accurate, and a parent who treats it as reliable will be surprised.
Turning off autoplay does more for a younger child's viewing than any filter.
Messaging
Who can add the child, whether their number is discoverable, and whether groups can add them without approval.
Group chats are where most bullying and most unwanted content between children happens, and the group settings are the practical control.
Reading messages is a separate question and has its own note; this is about who can reach them in the first place.
Keeping up
Services change defaults, add features and reset settings in updates.
Which makes this a periodic check rather than a setup task: twice a year, and after any major app change.
Ask the child to show you the settings rather than doing it yourself where they are old enough, which teaches the thing you want them to be able to do at eighteen.
What to check
For each service your child uses, who can contact them?
Is location sharing off by default?
Is voice chat with strangers possible in any game they play?
And do they know what to do about a request from somebody they do not know — which is the part no setting covers.
What this changes
Going through the five privacy questions on each service the child uses addresses contact risk, which no device-level control reaches and which is the category parents fear most..
The check
Open the privacy settings of one game your child plays and find out who can currently voice chat with them.
The answer is often everybody.
Doing it with them
Where the child is old enough, have them make the changes while you watch.
Which teaches the thing you actually want them to be able to do when nobody is setting it for them, and produces far less resistance than a parent going through settings alone.
Worth knowing
Services change defaults in updates, which makes this a twice-yearly check rather than a setup task. A setting reviewed a year ago may no longer exist in the form you left it.
One more thing
Ask the child to show you the settings rather than doing it yourself where they are old enough. It teaches the thing you want them able to do at eighteen and produces far less resistance.