Bark catches some emails. Microsoft Family blocks some apps. But neither sees the conversations happening inside Google Docs comments, Teams threads, Discord DMs, or Snapchat web. TATER TOTS does.
Every parental-monitoring tool sees the surfaces it was built to see. The dangerous conversations have moved to surfaces nobody is watching.
| Where conversations actually happen | Bark | Microsoft Family | Google Family Link | TATER TOTS |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Email (Gmail, Outlook web) | ✓ | ~ | — | ✓ |
| Teams chats & channel messages | ~ | — | — | ✓ |
| Google Chat, Google Docs comment threads | — | — | — | ✓ |
| Discord web DMs & servers | ~ | — | — | ✓ |
| Instagram & Snapchat web | ~ | — | — | ✓ |
| Anything else visible on the screen (OCR) | — | — | — | ✓ |
| Time budgets per app, per day | — | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Process control (kill / block-on-sight) | — | ~ | ~ | ✓ |
| Search every message and screenshot | ~ | — | — | ✓ |
| Self-hosted option (your data, your server) | — | — | — | ✓ |
Single ~11 MB binary. Installs as a Windows service via the official SCM, restart-on-failure, runs under SYSTEM so a standard user can't disable it. No Python or .NET runtime needed.
Foreground app, window titles, URLs (via the agent and an Edge extension), screenshots OCR'd for full-text search, downloads, now-playing media, and DOM snapshots from key web messaging surfaces. Idle-gated.
Email or SMS alerts on risky content. Search every message your kid has ever read or sent. Time budgets, scheduled blocks for school hours and bedtime. Kill or block apps from the parent dashboard.
Sign in from any browser. Filter by child, by app, by domain, by time range. Drill into any conversation. Acknowledge alerts. Add a co-parent so you both see the same thing.
Five default risk rules ship out of the box: self-harm phrases, drug references, address sharing, phone-number sharing, and "let's meet up / don't tell" patterns. Add your own with a few words. Routed to email or SMS based on severity.
"30 min/day of Discord, then auto-block." Daily totals reset on local midnight. The agent kills the process when the limit hits. School hours and bedtime are scheduled blocks — set once.
DOM scrapers from each messaging surface roll up into per-conversation threads. Click into "Discord — Alex" and see every message snapshot in chronological order, deduped.
Agent runs as SYSTEM. Edge extension force-installed via group policy — she can't disable it from edge://extensions. Auto-restart watchdog. JWT tokens revoked on password change.
Bark and Microsoft Family Safety together cost more than $200/year and somehow miss the conversations that actually matter — the ones happening in document comments, Discord DMs, and Snapchat web. Because they're API-only tools, they can only see what the platforms decide to expose.
TATER TOTS works at the device level. If your kid can read it, the agent can capture it. If she's typing into a Google Doc comment thread with a stranger, you'll see the comments. If she's in a Discord DM thread that Bark doesn't index, you'll see it. If she's renaming chrome.exe to notchrome.exe to dodge a block, the snapshot will tell you that too.
It's a sibling product to TATER, which does compliance monitoring for businesses. Same engineering team, same paranoid attention to detail, applied to a problem that hits closer to home.
See your kids' activity