WIRED Opinion publishes articles by outside contributors representing a wide range of viewpoints. whisper: the anonymous app Whisper, which has its headquarters in Los Angeles, was set up two years ago with the aim of allowing users to post messages anonymously enabling them to share. It’s not our job to judge their pleasures, but it is our job to make sure they’re safe. Whether their parents like it or not, kids want to spend time on anonymous apps. Our singleminded focus on the platform giants is fundamentally affecting children’s safety. While I’m not absolving tech giants of responsibility, we also need to talk about kids’ preference to fly under the radar when they use social media, reappropriating platforms like Sarahah for entirely new purposes and using apps adults have never even heard of. Get wholesome anonymous feedbacks from your friends, family and fans Get compliments, confessions and questions secretly Discover your strengths. This anecdote highlights a need to keep tabs on what kids are actually doing on social media. They didn’t, and so I abandoned the talk and gave them an introduction to anonymous apps instead. While the talk focused on harmful online content and used anonymous apps as a case study, I foolishly assumed the attendees would know what anonymous apps were. Anonymous messages posted on Whisper, the secret-sharing application, might not be so anonymous after all, according to a report from the Guardian published on Thursday.Whisper has strongly denied. For my current research project, I gave a talk to around 200 people involved in children’s protection. Anonymous apps rise and fall in popularity with immense speed, and this creates another huge problem for children’s safety: Adults often know nothing about them.