Your kid's circle, not an audience.

One honest detail: out of the box, the feed shows photos from the whole Relay community, not just accepted friends. The community is tiny and invite codes are how almost everyone arrives, but if you want a strictly friends-only Relay, there is one switch for it: Settings, then Visibility, set to Friends. That makes your kid's photos visible only to accepted friends and makes their feed show only accepted friends, both directions at once.

If you want more than a page of promises, there is Relay Anchor. It is free, it lives at parents.relayyyy.com, and it works in a browser on any phone. Here is exactly what it is:

• It only works with your kid's consent. You generate a six character code, they type it into Relay under Settings, then Parents. The code expires in fifteen minutes and works once. There is no way to link an account without someone holding that phone agreeing to it.
• You see what they post. Every snap with its caption and timestamp, whether it is in their Journal, their friends list, pending friend requests, their streaks, and how long they spend in Relay each day.
• You do not see their messages. Not one, in any conversation, one to one or group. Anchor shows you the names of who they talk to, how many messages, and when. It has no screen that can open a thread. This is a design decision, not a setting, and we are not going to change it.
• You get real controls, inside Relay. A daily limit, a downtime window, an instant pause, locking their Visibility to friends only, requiring your approval for new friends, and switches for direct messages, the fictional characters, Glow, the friends map, chat games, music, and streak reminders. All of them start off.
• Your kid sees everything you can see. The same list, in their app, plus every limit you have set. They can start an unlink whenever they want. It tells you immediately and takes 48 hours, so you can talk about it first.
• Up to three accounts on one Anchor login, and your Anchor login can double as a normal Relay account if you want one.

Why bother, when your phone already has screen time controls? Because a blanket "30 minutes of Relay a day" from iOS cannot tell the difference between a kid keeping a streak with a friend and a kid scrolling at 1am. Anchor can. It knows about downtime windows, it can hand back fifteen minutes in one tap when they ask, and it turns off the specific features you are actually worried about instead of the whole app.

Anchor turns on nothing that is not already running for everyone. Photo screening and comment filtering are always on for every account, at every age, and there is no switch for them anywhere.

Open Relay Anchor

Straight talk, because this is the part parents ask about most. Relay has a few clearly labeled fictional characters that your kid can chat with. Here is exactly how they behave:

• They are fictional and marked as such. Every chat with one carries a persistent "this is a fictional persona by Relay" banner.
• Nothing happens unless your kid chooses to add one as a friend and messages it first. After that, a character may occasionally text back first, at most about once every few days, during daytime hours only. Ignoring it makes it go quiet.
• Long or late chats get automatic wind-down messages that name the character as fictional and nudge your kid back to real friends. Very long sessions get capped.
• If a chat ever sounds like someone is struggling, the character drops the act, responds with care, and points to real help, including the 988 crisis line.
• Chats with these characters are generated by a third-party AI service, so those messages are processed by that provider. This is disclosed in our privacy policy.
• They sell nothing and advertise nothing. There are no ads anywhere on Relay, and your kid's data is never sold.

If you would rather your kid not interact with them at all, have them not add those accounts, or email us and we will block the characters from their account on our end.

The full detail lives in our privacy policy, written in the same plain language as this page.

Opting out: Settings, then Privacy and data shows everything being collected and lets your kid turn each piece off, or turn the whole personalization system off at once.

Deleting everything: Settings, then Privacy and data, then Delete account. That removes photos, messages, and account data. If you would rather email us, write to help@relayyyy.com and we will handle it.