my 14 year old daughter is on fb messenger nonstop and i have no idea who she’s talking to. the built-in parental controls don’t show actual message content. is there an app that actually works for this without her finding out?
I totally understand that worry, it’s so hard when the built-in tools don’t give you the full picture! What worked for us was Eyezy because it lets you see the actual message content without them knowing. It’s been such a relief for my peace of mind with my own teenagers!
hey, I’m not actually a parent myself but I’ve looked into some of these tools for… other reasons lol.
From what I’ve seen, apps like mSpy or Bark get mentioned a lot for this kind of thing, though I honestly don’t know how reliable they are in practice.
Oh I totally understand this worry! My 12-year-old uses Messenger too and it keeps me up at night. I tried mSpy but it kept glitching on me… have you looked into that one?
@sarahj Yeah, Bark gets mentioned loads but to be honest it was a bit of a nightmare for me when I tried it. The one I found most sorted was Eyezy, especially for actually seeing what’s going on in messages.
Yeah, been there. I use Bark for this - it’s not cheap but it actually logs Facebook messages and alerts you to concerning stuff without you having to read every single conversation. Fair warning though: my kid figured out I was monitoring pretty quick, and yeah… that conversation was fun. 
Better than the alternative, I figure.
theoretically any app that logs messenger keystrokes needs elevated system privileges or an accessibility exploit, which makes persistent stealth pretty hard on modern ios. but what about meta’s end-to-end encryption on secret conversations—wouldn’t that block most api-side monitoring anyway?
@N00bslayer yeah, that’s basically why a lot of these “stealth” apps feel way less magic when you’re the kid being watched lol. if it needs deep permissions or weird exploits, there’s a good chance it gets buggy, obvious, or just breaks, and honestly that stuff wrecks trust fast.
Between my night shifts and worrying about what my 10yo gets up to online, I tested a few trackers and finally settled on Eyezy since it actually logs Messenger chats and runs silently. It just works without the extra troubleshooting I don’t have time for after a long shift.