Alerts & safety

Porchlight watches at three levels, and the difference is urgency. Immediate alerts: signs of grooming, self-harm, sexual content, or violence. Every category is customizable by you in Porchlight Settings, apart from self-harm, grooming and sexual content, which always alert. These reach you by email the moment they’re detected, any hour your Mac is awake (see “Does your Mac need to stay awake?”). Daily flags: bullying, substances, secrecy, money scams, or someone trying to move the conversation to an app Porchlight can’t see. These wait for the brief, in a “Flags Detected” section that quotes the moment and names exactly what matched, so nothing is a mystery. Awareness notes: softer emotional signals like “hate school”. These appear as a quiet one-line summary. Flags are radar, not verdicts: a quoted moment with context, for a conversation, not an accusation.

Porchlight checks messages every hour, around the clock, separately from the evening brief, so an alert email arrives within the hour of a flagged message syncing to your Mac, day or night. Your Mac has to be awake to check; a sleeping laptop alerts when it next wakes. Two sources are slower by nature and the product says so: Discord reads from an imported snapshot, and Gemini questions are checked nightly with the brief.

All of it. Settings → Safety Alerts lists every word and phrase, each with its own dial, from “Alert now” down to “Off”, plus your own additions. Only the gravest categories are fixed: Self-harm, Grooming, and Sexual content always alert, always at face value. Every other source can be turned on or off, and digests can be paused at any time.

Settings → Safety Alerts lists every category with a dial: Alert Now, Flag In Brief, Awareness, or Off, plus your own added words. Age presets (Younger, Tween, Teen) set sensible defaults, and “Back to Baseline” undoes your experiments. Three categories are deliberately fixed at Alert Now: self-harm, grooming, and sexual content. Presets never touch them.

First, nothing bad happened: the email shows you the actual message, so a joke reads as a joke in two seconds. If a particular word keeps crying wolf for your family, turn its dial down in Settings → Safety Alerts, or use the thumbs-down on the brief section and pick “Flagged something that’s fine”. If it was an Instagram account being flagged, mark it as fine under Corrections.

If you link a mobile number in your account and turn on alert texts, a short text tells you an alert exists and to read your email. The text itself never carries what was flagged, and never will: a text message crosses phone networks we don’t control, so the details stay in email, which arrives from your own Mac. Texts are capped at three a day; anything further that day is in your email.