Bark - Parental Controls

Bark Technologies, Inc.

About this app

Bark provides families with the tools they need to raise kids in the digital age. Our comprehensive service lets you monitor content, manage screen time, and filter websites so you can get peace of mind while your child is online.

CONTENT MONITORING

Bark monitors your child’s text messages, email, YouTube, and 30+ apps and social media platforms for issues like cyberbullying, suicidal ideation, adult content, sexual predators, profanity, threats of violence, and more. Parents receive alerts only when something potentially problematic occurs online. You won’t have full access to everything on your child’s phone — just the things you might need to know about.

SCREEN TIME MANAGEMENT

Families can set healthy time limits and create schedules for when their children’s devices can connect to the internet (through both cell service and Wi-Fi).

WEB FILTERING

Our web filter lets you select which websites your child can access on their devices. You can allow or block specific sites — or even whole categories like streaming services, online gaming, sexual content, and more.

BARK HOME

When you purchase Bark Home, a small device sold separately that connects to your Wi-Fi router, you can use our app to manage screen time and filter websites and apps on all of the Wi-Fi-connected devices in your home, from smart TVs and video game consoles to laptops and tablets. Bark Home requires an active Bark subscription.

PRICING

Bark, our comprehensive online safety solution, includes content monitoring, screen time management, and web filtering. Bark is $14/month — or $99 annually.

Bark Jr provides screen time management and web filtering for $5/month or $49 annually.

SETTING UP BARK

After you download the Bark app for parents and guardians, you’ll need to download the Bark for Kids app to your child’s device to enable monitoring, screen time management, and more. Visit www.bark.us/android to install it.

Ratings and reviews

When it works, it's great! I appreciate the alerts & ability to see where my child is on the map (including how fast the car is traveling). But if we go just a little way out of the town limits or even inside some houses...zero signal. It wouldn't be so frustrating if we knew we were in areas with poor cell signal, but everything else we have running off cell towers works great. Can't figure out why we can't get better reception. Alerts & texts take days to come thru when sent while no signal.

This app is infuriating. It takes 10 very slow steps to do something that should take one or two. There's no way to turn off "school" mode for a week, like every school does all the time. There's no way to "pause until next period". There's no way to edit someone's name. It's just a horribly put together app, like it was thrown together on a weekend, and never improved. Sure, it works, but only barely, and you'll be grumpy using it.

This app is not that great at picking up on things. We had some disturbing things found on a device that the app never picked up, and it was obvious. For privacy reasons, I'm not going into detail here, but it ended up pretty serious in our case. When my husband contacted customer service he was told that we were basically out of luck with the one year payment we made and that the device has to be synced to the device it was set up on or something like that. Not reliable at school.