How ShieldScan works

What this site is

ShieldScan is a free toolkit for parents. Three layers, in rough order of how parents tend to use them:

• Crisis routing — pages written for the moment something just happened. /help-now is the triage hub; /first-30-minutes is the slower 24-hour script; /resources is the curated hotline list.
• Awareness — long-form explainers on grooming, sextortion, bullying, and the algorithmic content that actually reaches teens. Plus a slang glossary so the words in your kid's feed make sense.
• Tools and conversations — interactive things you actually do as a parent. Username and image checks. The Family Digital Constitution. Fifteen conversation scripts. Nine platform safety walkthroughs.

There is no account, no email collection, and no analytics. Every page on this site runs entirely in your browser — none of your input is sent to a server we control, and none of it touches a third-party service. ShieldScan is built and written by a person, not generated by AI.

The voice we write in

Every page on this site is written in a single deliberate voice: warm, protective, parent-empowering, and never alarmist. We treat parents as the front line, not as bystanders. We treat children as people who are going to be fine if the adults around them stay calm — and we write the pages so that the calm version of you is the one who reads them.

Some specific commitments inside that voice:

• No fear-mongering. The internet is genuinely full of risk, and naming risk honestly is how parents protect their kids. But the tone is “you can spot this and respond” — never “the world is ending.”
• No third-party authority backbone. We synthesize what researchers, clinicians, and law enforcement know, but we write our own pages. We do not lean on NCMEC, RAINN, or any single organization as the spine of an argument. When we cite a statistic, we cite it briefly and link out.
• Means-restriction on harmful-content topics. On the awareness page about algorithmically-pushed harmful content (eating disorders, self-harm, body image), we deliberately do not name specific weights, BMIs, behaviors, self-harm methods, or compound names. Naming those is part of how harmful content spreads.
• Trauma-informed disclosure. A child's first attempt to tell an adult something hard is almost always partial, inconsistent, halting, and sometimes disguised as a story about a “friend.” The site treats those patterns as normal trauma responses, not as reasons to discredit the child.

Where the awareness content comes from

The awareness pages on this site draw on:

• Krissy's published research. The grooming and sextortion pages adapt material from a chapter on modern slavery and online recruitment, translated from policy audience to US parent audience.
• FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) public advisories. Used sparingly, for US-specific statistics on online enticement and sextortion targeting minors. The IC3 portal is also where we point parents to file reports.
• DOJ public reporting and the ICAC Task Force network. For the “what happens if you involve law enforcement” material.
• Clinical sources for the harmful-content page. NIMH on eating disorders. The National Alliance for Eating Disorders for treatment routing (NEDA's helpline was permanently discontinued in 2023; the Alliance is the active replacement). Standard clinical framing of body dysmorphic disorder, including the muscle-focused variant.

The two America's Future booklets at /handouts are written by Krissy directly, in a voice meant for kids. They are companions to the parent-side awareness pages — same source material, different audience.

Things we won't do

• Monitoring or surveillance. ShieldScan is not a service that watches your kid's phone, reads their messages, or logs their activity. We do not offer those capabilities, and we believe building parent awareness through trust outperforms building it through surveillance.
• Third-party AI services. There is no chatbot, no AI-powered search, and no “ask Claude” box on this site. Pages are written by a person and served as static HTML. Your input is never forwarded to OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, or any other model provider — because there is nothing on the site that would do that forwarding.
• Accounts, emails, or identifying data. There is no sign-up. We do not ask for your name, your email, your child's name, or any identifier. We do not know who uses the site.
• Analytics or trackers. No Google Analytics. No Vercel Web Analytics. No Facebook pixel. No retargeting. We do not know which pages are popular, and we do not measure conversion. The privacy promise depends on nothing being there to break.
• Aggregating data about kids or families. Because we don't collect any in the first place.
• Push notifications or email digests. You come to the site when you need it. We do not poke you, badge you, or pull you back.

The privacy story, in one paragraph

Every page on this site renders as static HTML and runs in your browser only. Username checks, image searches, the Constitution builder, the conversation library, the awareness pages, the platform walkthroughs, the slang glossary, the crisis-routing hub — none of those send anything to a server we control, and none touch a third-party service. The full version of the policy lives on the privacy page.

Updates

ShieldScan is built to be edited. Content changes in version control; new awareness topics, new platforms, new conversations, and new booklets are added as they are written. There is no newsletter. The way you find out something has changed is by coming back to the site.