Bark - Parental Controls

What is Bark?

Bark is a parental control app that helps you control your children’s online activities. It is a cloud-based parental control application that deploys all the features that one has come to expect from cell phone spy apps of this nature. Bark lets you take screenshots from the target phone every second and deliver them to you.

How Bark works?

With an intuitive and user-friendly dashboard, Bark gives your kid a safe web browsing and smartphone usage experience. By using the app, you can monitor the text messages, emails, social media usage, and web browsing activities of your children.

Created on the basis of proper research and consultation from child psychologists, youth advisors, and digital media experts, the app gives you some of the best parental control features including web filters, screen time management, location tracking, clever algorithms that detect potential risks, and different alerts whenever there’s a suspicious activity.

While Bark focuses on cyber-bullying and monitoring messaging apps, Bark Jr. is a tool for parents to set up screen time monitoring and web filtering.

The apps sound alarms on your phone when your child is trying to access a website or app that's not on an approved list. I love this because you can, for example, temporarily make something like PBS Kids or YouTube part of the unapproved list during homework time. If they try to access something on the unapproved list, you are alerted immediately, allowing you to manage usage without standing over their shoulders.

Bark works on iOS, Android, and Kindle, though setup was a bit clunky. The customer service, however, is top notch and can get you going should you encounter any hiccups.

Does Bark have a free trial?

Bark offers a 7-day trial period, but you do have to put in your payment information first.

How much does Bark costs?

Bark costs a maximum of $14.99 a month. If you don't need access to Bark's full monitoring power, you can choose the $5.99-a-month option (Bark Jr.). 

Pros:

• Multiple social media applications monitoring
• Sends automatic alerts
• Award-winning dashboard
• Provide location check-ins

Cons:

• Not easy to configure
• No direct filtering
• Expensive for some