We have child locks; what about grandparental locks?
Why are we not considering grandparental “locks” and elder safe communities online, like we do for kids?
When I am home, every morning begins with the same question by my grandma: “Did this insert very famous, very alive celebrity die?” In a world filled with deepfakes, digital scams, and data leaks, we have so many conversations about how to keep our kids safe on the internet. What about our elderly?
We talk about iPad babies all the time: how Cocomelon and constant doomscrolling are reducing children’s attention spans, how their ideal body standards are being morphed at a young age, and what this means for us as humanity and for our generations to come. However, a much-ignored, rampant phenomenon is iPad grandparents. As technology gets more affordable and medicine continues to advance, a growing number of healthy, retired people are coming online who are not digital natives. Having not grown up with the internet, they lack the discernment that millennials and later generations have naturally developed toward it. We sell them on technology as a boon, with all knowledge and services at their fingertips, yet we rarely warn them what to look out for. We can’t, really, because none of us knows what the next inventive scam will be.
In May, the wife of an elderly family friend had a brutal fall. She lay on the floor in pain for nearly seven hours through the night because her husband believed he couldn’t leave the house. He was under “digital arrest,” and the people who put him there had already taken his life savings. Digital arrest is a new crop of scams in which people pose as police officers, tell victims over a video call that they’re under investigation, cite highly personal details to sound credible, and say they must pay their way out. Government data reviewed by News18 counts 297,727 complaints and ₹4,057.7 crore ($425 million) lost to these scams between 2022 and May 2026 in India alone. This is not just a problem in India. Elderly Americans reported $7.7 billion in scam losses to the FBI in 2025 alone, up by 59% in a single year.
Unbounded digital access without awareness is opening up this entire population to severe vulnerabilities. My grandmother has me. I’m the one she asks who’s alive, whose calls to pick up, and how much to trust what she sees online. Many elderly people don’t have anyone to ask. They live alone, and they’ve been told the internet is a source of support, so they treat it like an authority. Why are we not considering grandparental “locks” and elder safe communities online, like we do for kids?
The argument against this is that they’re adults. They can perceive what’s happening in the world. But what it’s really like is handing someone a dense legal contract in a language they can’t read, while everyone around them has already signed and is using the product aggressively. We would call that exploitation. Yet every day, a retiree who never grew up online clicks “I agree.” Tech companies say, “They read the terms.” Did they? Could they? Consent no one can understand isn’t consent. It’s a signature on a blank page.