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Many households include children who use voice personal assistants (VPA) such as Amazon Alexa. Children benefit from the rich functionalities of VPAs and third-party apps but are also exposed to new risks in the VPA ecosystem. In this article, we first investigate “risky” child-directed voice apps that contain inappropriate content or ask for personal information through voice interactions. We build SkillBot—a natural language processing-based system to automatically interact with VPA apps and analyze the resulting conversations. We find 28 risky child-directed apps and maintain a growing dataset of 31,966 non-overlapping app behaviors collected from 3,434 Alexa apps. Our findings suggest that although child-directed VPA apps are subject to stricter policy requirements and more intensive vetting, children remain vulnerable to inappropriate content and privacy violations. We then conduct a user study showing that parents are concerned about the identified risky apps. Many parents do not believe that these apps are available and designed for families/kids, although these apps are actually published in Amazon’s “Kids” product category. We also find that parents often neglect basic precautions, such as enabling parental controls on Alexa devices. Finally, we identify a novel risk in the VPA ecosystem: confounding utterances or voice commands shared by multiple apps that may cause a user to interact with a different app than intended. We identify 4,487 confounding utterances, including 581 shared by child-directed and non-child-directed apps. We find that 27% of these confounding utterances prioritize invoking a non-child-directed app over a child-directed app. This indicates that children are at real risk of accidentally invoking non-child-directed apps due to confounding utterances.
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This content will become publicly available on April 1, 2026
Parent-Child Adaptive Responses for Digital Resilience
This research investigates U.S. parents’ responses to the rapidly changing, novel environment of the internet, applying evolutionary theory and interdisciplinary methodologies. Novel environments pose potential challenges to existing adaptive strategies, so this research investigates important questions about how parents and children perceive the risks of children’s entry into the virtual world and how they mitigate potential risks. The research focuses on parents of children in middle childhood (children ages 6–12), a significant period in human life history when children start building relationships outside the family. We utilize in-depth interviews (n = 26), cultural domain analysis (n = 32), surveys (n = 199), and participatory co-design (n = 34) to synergize theoretical concepts in evolutionary anthropology with the applied research focus of human–computer interaction. Cultural domain maps and interview results identify and classify perceptions of costs, benefits, and risks, including intrinsic and extrinsic sources of risk and risk tangibility. Survey results further identify platforms and risks of highest priority and confirm parental interest in new kinds of tools for managing the digital experiences of their children. Life history theory informs our approach to the development of parental control software that favors skill building and encourages parent–child discussions supporting child executive function and resilience to risks.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2210082
- PAR ID:
- 10641704
- Publisher / Repository:
- MDPI
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Social Sciences
- Volume:
- 14
- Issue:
- 4
- ISSN:
- 2076-0760
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 197
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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