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 ID, a parent's ID, or quietly reads every message they send, is trading 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 get 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.

Content scanning breaks the protection it claims to offer

Any system that can read "bad" messages can also read every other message. And it can be re-pointed by whoever holds the keys next — 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.

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.

The library we're building

We're writing a free library of short, practical guides — for parents and for children, separately. It's the part of our product that doesn't look like a product.

Free, on the web and in the apps:

Everything we publish in this library will be free. You'll find it on this website and directly inside the Orbit apps for parents and for children — no paywall, no email capture, no "upgrade to read."

For parents

  • Conversation starters by age — "what to ask a 7-year-old" vs. "what to ask a 13-year-old"
  • How to spot pressure, grooming, and coercion patterns — without panicking
  • What not to do when you find something worrying (the reaction that makes them never tell you again)
  • Coaching resilience: helping a child handle the bad moments themselves, not just blocking the bad moments
  • Honest guidance on screen time, sleep, and the research actually says

For children

  • What privacy really means — and why it's yours to keep
  • Why your phone number, address, and photos are private by default
  • How to tell a real friend request from a scammy one
  • How to ask a trusted adult for help without feeling like you're in trouble
  • What a healthy online friendship looks like — and what it definitely doesn't

We're writing it now. Get the first release by joining the early-access list below.

How this shows up in Orbit

A philosophy only matters if the product reflects it. Here's how Orbit turns "education, not control" into actual features:

  • Parental approval for new contacts — oversight without spying. You see who wants to talk to your child; you don't have to read every message to do your job.
  • Per-child content filters — your rules, set on your family's device, not our server. What's right for one child isn't right for another, and we don't pretend otherwise.
  • No ads, no algorithmic feed — nothing optimised to keep your child scrolling. We make money from families who choose to pay, not from attention we've extracted.
  • End-to-end encryption by design — so "we can't read your messages" is a real guarantee, not a policy we could change next quarter. See the technical details →

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 scan the contents of your family's messages. Not with keywords. Not with AI. Not with "client-side" tricks that amount to the same thing.
  • We will never build behavioural profiles of children for sale or for ads. There's no advertiser on the other end of Orbit, and there won't be.
  • We will never use dark patterns to make your child use the app longer. 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.