For too long, we’ve accepted that the internet—one of humanity’s most powerful innovations—comes with a hidden cost: children’s safety. Over the past two decades, digital platforms, app ecosystems, and artificial intelligence have reshaped how we communicate, learn, and earn. The economic and societal benefits are real. But so are the harms—and they are not accidental.

Parents across the United States and around the world are alarmed. A vast majority are more concerned about their children’s online safety than any other safety issue at home. They see what research also confirms: heavy smartphone and social media use is correlated with rising depression, anxiety, sleep disruption, and other negative outcomes among children and teens. These are not minor inconveniences—they are life-changing harms rooted in system design.

I’ve spent my professional career working at the intersection of digital governance, safety technology, and real-world impact. As CEO of The Proudfoot Group, I’ve seen firsthand how traditional approaches—parental controls, platform policies, and legal mandates—fall painfully short against the scale and sophistication of modern harms. That’s why our work at ChildSafe.dev and with RoseShield is not an add-on. It’s foundational.

The problem is simple: technology today was not built for children. Engagement-driven algorithms prioritize time-on-screen and interaction over well-being. Platforms lack built-in protections against exploitation, grooming, and exposure to harmful content. Parents are asked to monitor experiences they don’t control and can’t see—while advertisers and automated systems pull young users deeper into unsafe environments. That model is broken.

At ChildSafe.dev, we’re focused on a different paradigm: safety by design. Rather than leaving child protection to catch-all policies or voluntary platform effort, we provide the technical infrastructure developers need to make digital experiences genuinely safer. Safety should be engineered in, not tacked on.

And this is where RoseShield plays a transformative role.

RoseShield: The Safety Layer the Internet Has Never Had

RoseShield is not another parental control app or reporting tool. It’s a real-time, AI-driven safety engine designed to protect children at the system level—across text, voice, avatars, and interactive environments—before harm reaches them. It looks for behavioral patterns associated with grooming and risk in real time, generating risk scores and evidence packets for platforms to act on, without requiring personally identifiable information. This privacy-by-design approach respects children’s rights while addressing the core mechanisms of harm.

RoseShield enables:

1. automated detection of predatory behavior across messaging and social interactions
2. filtering and de-ranking harmful content before it is presented to young users
3. risk scoring and context signals that let platforms act with precision
4. lightweight integration via APIs or metadata streams, so safety isn’t an afterthought

Because RoseShield analyzes metadata and behavioral signals instead of harvesting private data, it preserves privacy while proactively safeguarding children. This is safety that actually works—at scale.

Why Traditional Solutions Aren’t Enough

Laws, regulations, or stronger platform moderation are important, but they can’t fix a design problem by decree. Parental controls, while helpful, are powerless against invisible algorithms and immersive digital systems that are engineered to engage—not protect.

RoseShield and the tools on ChildSafe.dev change this by giving developers and companies something they’ve never truly had: built-in safety infrastructure that can keep up with the pace and scale of today’s online world. This isn’t about replacing parental responsibility or policy safeguards—it’s about empowering every digital platform to protect children as a baseline expectation.

A Call to Action

If we are serious about protecting children online, we must move beyond fear and reaction. We need technology that anticipates harm, detects risk, and intervenes before tragedy occurs. That’s the mission of ChildSafe.dev and RoseShield: to turn the promise of digital connection into a reality that kids can safely experience.

Parents should not have to choose between learning opportunities and safety risks. Kids should not have to navigate a landscape that was never designed for them. At scale, in real time, with respect for privacy—we can build a digital world where children are not just users, but protected participants.

This is our perspective. This is why we created the tools that will finally make online safety real.