Your teenager’s Instagram is supposed to be private by default now, with notifications off at night. Yours is not. Nothing about you changed at eighteen. The rules did.
In July 2025 the European Commission published guidelines for platforms used by under-18s. The list is short. An account should be visible only to people the user has accepted. Push notifications off by default, and always off at night. Like counts, streaks, read receipts and “is typing” switched off. No autoplay, and no “possibility to scroll indefinitely”.1 In the Commission’s words: “Platforms have no excuse to be continuing practices that put children at risk.”2
The list describes the apps you use
The regulators did not invent a safe app. They listed the parts of the existing one that hold your attention, and asked for them to be switched off for children.
Read it again as a description. Every line names something the big apps do by default: a public profile, a feed with no bottom, videos that start themselves, a count under every post, a ping at midnight.
Meta says it did this. Testers and regulators disagree
Meta announced Teen Accounts in September 2024: private by default, messages only from people the teen follows, notifications muted at night.3 A year later, a former Meta safety engineer and researchers at two US universities tested 47 of Instagram’s safety features with teen, parent and adult test accounts. They found 30 either gone or got round in under three minutes.4 Meta called the report “misleading, dangerously speculative”.5 Then the Commission, which had read Meta’s internal documents, reached a preliminary finding. Instagram’s time tools, “including those activated by default for teens, can be easily dismissed and do not lead to a meaningful reduction” in use.6 Meta disagrees.7 A New Mexico jury, meanwhile, found that Meta “misled consumers about the safety of its platforms”. Meta is appealing.8
None of this is settled: the finding is preliminary, the verdict is under appeal, and the testers counted features, not harm. But testers and regulator agree on one thing. The list has not been delivered.
Nothing on the list is only for children
Nothing in the regulators’ list is about being fifteen. A profile strangers can see, a scroll with no end and a count under every post work on a forty-year-old the same way. The list is what a product looks like when it is not paid to hold you.
It also describes this directory. Most products here are visible only to people you invite, have no feed or one in plain time order, and show no public counts. Where one falls short, usually on notifications, its card says so in the row.
Try this
Use the regulators’ list as your own. Then pick a group letter that only invited people can read, with nothing ranked and no public counts. That is true of every card in that view.
See all the alternatives. We make one of them, DearAll, and it is marked as ours.