Someone in your family set up Porchlight. Here's exactly what it does.

No spin. If you're going to be annoyed about this, be annoyed about the real thing rather than something you imagined.

Porchlight runs on one Mac in your home. Once a day it sends whoever set it up a short summary of how your day looked. Not a transcript, a summary. Think of it like the difference between someone reading your diary and someone noticing you seemed quiet at dinner.

One more honest thing: your parent can set Porchlight to run without an icon in the menu bar or the Dock on that Mac. It's still there, listed in Applications, doing exactly what this page says and nothing more. Hidden from the screen isn't hidden from you.

What it does not do

This is the part most people get wrong when they imagine it, so it's first.

• It does not send your messages to a company. Nothing you write leaves that Mac. Not to us, not to a server, not anywhere. All the summarising happens on that Mac.
• It does not show your parent your messages word for word. They see a short description like “mostly plans with friends about Saturday”, not the messages.
• It does not track where you are. No location, ever.
• It does not listen to your microphone, watch through a camera, or record your screen.
• It does not read your phone's messages, apps or browsing. The only thing that can ever come from a phone is daily health numbers: steps, and how long you slept, and only if someone set that up separately and you allowed it in the Health app. Nothing else, and nothing you wrote.
• Nobody at Porchlight can see your stuff. We genuinely can't. It never reaches us. That's the whole design.

What it actually tells them

• Roughly how much you talked, and with whom, by name, not by what you said.
• A few sentences on the general shape of your day. Busy, quiet, stressed, cheerful.
• If you send a voice note, the computer listens to it and writes down roughly what was said, the same way it reads a text. That happens on the computer at home, and the recording is not kept.
• Whichever extras they switched on: how long you were on the Mac, what you watched or searched, what you listened to.
• If something looks genuinely serious (someone being cruel to you, an adult being creepy, you sounding really low), they get told sooner rather than waiting for the daily summary.

If you think this isn't fair

That's a reasonable thing to think, and it's worth saying out loud rather than working around it. A few things that actually help:

• Ask what they're worried about. Usually it's one specific thing, and usually it's smaller than the whole idea of monitoring.
• Ask what would let them turn parts of it off. Most of it is optional and can be switched off one piece at a time.
• Ask them to read this page with you, so you're both arguing about the same facts.

If you're not safe at home, this page isn't the right help. Talk to someone you trust outside your family: a teacher, a school counsellor, a relative.