What we believe
Children learn to be safe online the same way they learn to be safe crossing a road: with adults who explain, model, and coach, not by being kept inside forever. The skills they need are learnable. We think a big part of our job is to help teach them.
Parents deserve tools that make that coaching easier, not tools that try to do the parenting for them. Good tools give you a seat at the conversation; they don't replace you.
Privacy is part of safety. Any system that demands a child's or parent's ID, or silently reads every message they send, trades one risk for a bigger one. The data that gets collected to "protect" your family is the same data that gets leaked, sold, or re-purposed a year from now.
What we think doesn't work
These aren't hypothetical concerns. They're the patterns we keep seeing proposed, shipped, and quietly walked back.
Blanket bans push the problem underground
Ban an app, and determined children find another one. Ban a category, and they find a VPN. What reliably changes isn't that they stop. It's that they stop asking adults for help when something goes wrong. That's the worst possible outcome.
Age verification demands real identity
"Prove you're old enough" sounds reasonable until you realise what it means: ID uploads, face scans, cross-referenced databases. Those systems leak. When they do, the cost is paid by everyone scanned, most of whom weren't the target. The existence of the database is itself the risk.
Reading messages on a server breaks the protection it claims to offer
Any system that reads your messages on a server to check for "bad" content can also read every other message. And tomorrow's owner of that server might not be as careful as today's: a different company, a different political climate, a different set of priorities. A door that only opens for good guys isn't a door; it's a promise. This is why Mack, our AI safety guard, runs on your child's phone, not on our servers. The actual words never reach our servers, full stop.
One rule for every family can't fit every family
Reasonable choices for a 7-year-old, a 12-year-old, and a 15-year-old are not the same. Reasonable choices for your family are not the same as reasonable choices for ours. Top-down rules assume a uniformity that doesn't exist, and families end up either over-restricted or ignoring the rule entirely.
Meet Mack: AI safety on the phone, not in the cloud Beta
Mack has got your back. Mack is our AI safety guard, brand-new, built and trained by us, and currently in Beta. The whole point of Mack is that Mack lives on your child's phone, not on our servers, and not in anybody's cloud. Read the full Mack page →
The obvious question after the section above: if reading messages on a server is off the table, how does Orbit catch bullying, sexual solicitation, or a child in crisis? The answer is Mack. Mack runs on your child's phone, watching the messages your child trades with other children: reading outgoing messages in the moment before they're sent, and incoming messages in the moment after the phone has unlocked them to be read. Both of those moments, when phones hold unlocked messages on either end, are how end-to-end encryption has always worked. We use them, on your child's own phone, to give Mack a look. We do both directions because another family's parents may have their Mack set up differently from you, so your settings need to apply to what comes in, not just what goes out. Our servers only ever see the locked-up message. End-to-end encryption is not weakened in any way; the actual words never leave the phone for the safety check.
This is the gap between Orbit and products like Bark, which read messages on a server or by getting at them through the messaging app, meaning they read your child's conversations. Orbit doesn't. Mack runs on the phone, what Mack decides stays on the phone, and what leaves the phone is an alert plus the flagged message sealed under lock and key for you alone, your child's own parent. Our servers can't read it, and Mack never reports the words back to anyone else, ever.
Why an AI on the phone instead of a word list?
Word lists need someone to write down every bad word in advance. That sounds doable until you meet the real problem: children talk in slang, abbreviations, and in-jokes that change all the time; harm is usually in the meaning, not in the words themselves; and innocent messages get caught when a banned word turns up by accident. The result: too much gets stopped (your child gives up on the app and finds somewhere less visible to chat) or too much gets through (the harmful stuff didn't happen to use a word on the list). Mack is trained on how children actually talk, so Mack picks up the meaning, not just the words. Mack is a best guess, and it will sometimes miss things, but it handles rephrasing and context in a way a word list simply can't. And it does it all without a single readable word leaving the phone.
We still include a watchlist for words you want to keep an eye on, like a friend's name or an app you're worried about, but the watchlist is notification-only. It never stops a message. Mack handles the big categories; the watchlist handles the personal, family-specific things only you would know to watch for. Both run on the phone.
What Orbit will never be
Commitments, not aspirations. These are the things we've deliberately chosen not to build into Orbit, and won't, even if the market or a regulator asks for them:
- We will never require government-issued ID to use Orbit. No passport scans. No driver's licence uploads. No "prove you're a real adult" bottlenecks.
- We will never read your family's messages on our servers. Mack, our AI safety guard, runs on your child's phone; our servers never see the words. We will not build or operate any system that reads your messages on our servers, whether by word-matching, AI, or any other method. The phone is the line; we will not cross it. Mack is the proof that safety and privacy don't have to trade off.
- We will never build a profile of your child for sale or for ads. There's no advertiser on the other end of Orbit, and there won't be.
- We will never use sneaky tricks to keep your child on the app. No streaks designed to create guilt. No notifications engineered to pull them back. Closing the app should feel fine.
Be first to get it
Early access includes the app itself, and the first wave of the free library, delivered on web and in the apps as we publish it. One email when we launch. No spam.