Consent
Permission is on the record before anything happens
A young person does not take part until consent has been recorded, and an age nobody knows is treated as a refusal rather than a question for later. A parent can withdraw at any time — and the record of what they agreed to, and when, is kept.
- 0
- conversations a young person joins before consent is recorded
- 0
- unknown ages allowed to participate while somebody checks
- 0
- withdrawn records removed from the register
- 30
- days, at most, to answer a parent
- Recorded before participation, with evidence attached
- The young person can see who holds consent for them, and when it was given
- Withdrawable at any time, with a reason, by an explicit action
First, not afterwards
The order is the whole safeguard
Consent collected after a young person has already been messaging is a filing exercise. Consent collected first is a control.
Participation waits
Until a consent record exists for a young person, they are not in conversations. Not muted, not limited — not in them. There is no state where a child is taking part and the paperwork is following behind.
An unknown age is a refusal
If the platform does not know how old somebody is, it treats them as somebody who needs consent and does not have it. The product would rather refuse a young person who could lawfully take part than admit one who could not.
And nothing defaults to yes
There is no configuration that assumes consent, infers it from a signature elsewhere, or treats silence as agreement. Somebody records it, deliberately, with their name against the act.
The age threshold that decides whether consent is needed at all is set by your jurisdiction, and your organization may raise it. It cannot lower it.
What a record holds
Enough to answer a regulator, and enough to answer a parent
Those are different questions. One asks whether permission existed; the other asks what exactly was agreed to.
- Who gave it
- The named parent or guardian, and the young person it covers. A consent record belongs to a specific pair of people, not to a household or an address.
- When it was given
- The moment it was recorded, which is the date that matters if anybody ever asks whether participation on a particular day was covered.
- The evidence behind it
- What was relied on — the form, the exchange, the record of the conversation — stored with the consent rather than in somebody’s filing cabinet, so producing it is not a search.
- What it covers
- Consent to participate, and separately whether that guardian holds reading access. Being a recorded parent and being able to read a child’s conversations are two different permissions, and the product keeps them apart.
- And the young person is shown it
- On a screen they can reach themselves, naming who holds consent for them and the date it was recorded. A young person who cannot see who has access has not been told, whatever the paperwork says.
The register is a grid an organization can search, filter and export, and every record has a page of its own carrying its evidence and its audit trail. Recording consent is a form somebody fills in, not a database query somebody runs.
Withdrawal
A parent can stop this, and the record of it stays
This is the section most products soften. It is written plainly here because a parent reading it deserves to know exactly what happens, including the part they may not like.
Everything the consent was for stops
Participation ends, and any reading access that guardian held ends with it. Withdrawal is an explicit action with a reason attached and a confirmation that says what will change — not a toggle that quietly takes effect.
The record is kept, not deleted
A withdrawn record stays in the register. It keeps the date consent was given, keeps the evidence, and gains the date it was withdrawn. It is marked withdrawn; it is not removed and it is not hidden.
Because it is the proof that what happened was lawful
The record is what shows that participation up to the withdrawal date had permission behind it. Destroying it would erase the organization’s account of its own conduct along with the parent’s permission, and the person most harmed by that is usually the child.
Where a jurisdiction gives a person the right to have data erased, that right is answered — but it is answered as a considered request against a retention basis, not by a delete button that also removes the evidence somebody may later need.
Answering a parent
How long your organization takes, and the ceiling it cannot pass
A right to withdraw that is answered whenever somebody gets round to it is not much of a right.
You set the number
Each organization states how many days it takes to answer a request, and that promise is the one the product holds it to — not a figure we chose on your behalf.
And the product chases it
A request is marked overdue against your own number, and a nightly job emails whichever staff you named. It carries counts and whole-day ages — never a family’s details — because a reminder is not a reason to move a child’s information around.
Bounded at thirty days
Whatever an organization sets, it cannot promise longer than thirty days. That is where GDPR Article 12(3), PIPEDA section 8(3) and Quebec’s Law 25 converge, and it is a floor under every tenant rather than a setting any of them can move.
As with every safety setting here, an organization may make itself stricter and cannot make itself looser.
In short
What to tell a parent
Three sentences, all of them checkable.
- Your child does not take part until your permission is recorded, and an age the platform does not know blocks participation rather than waiting for somebody to check.
- The record holds who agreed, when, and the evidence behind it — and your child can see on their own screen who holds it.
- You can withdraw at any time; everything it allowed stops, and the record of what you agreed to is kept as proof that what happened before was lawful.