Your Child Is In The Photographs Already
They are in the christening pictures and on the tree, and they did not agree to any of it. You did, on their behalf. This is what that means here.
Where This Starts
Somebody Decides For Them
Children appear in a family's record from the beginning, in photographs, in dates, in the tree itself. A child cannot consent to that.
An adult in the family is making that decision on their behalf. We would rather say that plainly than build a page around the idea that a four-year-old has given permission for anything.
So the question is not whether a child's record exists. It is who holds it, where it shows up, and what you can do about it.
What Is In Place Today
Four Controls, And What Each One Does
Each of these is in the database rather than in the app on a phone. That distinction is the whole point: a control that lives on the screen is a control that can be worked around.
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A Child's Record Sits Under An Adult
A child's record is held under an adult relative in the family. That authority is carried through the database rather than by the app on a phone, so it is not something a screen can be talked out of.
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A Child Is Not In The Member Directory
The directory is how one member finds another. A record the app can tell belongs to a child is not returned by it, so a stranger searching does not find your child.
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A Child Is Not Suggested As A Relative
Sibaya suggests people who might be family. A child is withheld from those suggestions, and the test runs the other way round from the directory: only a record positively shown to belong to an adult is ever suggested. An unknown age is withheld rather than offered.
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A Child With No Account Is Not Added To A Family Conversation
A child who has no account of their own cannot be invited into a family message room. There is no route that turns a child in a family's records into somebody being asked to make an account.
Where This Stops
What Those Four Do Not Do
Those four controls govern where a child's record appears and who holds authority over it. They are not supervision.
Sibaya does not watch your child's conversations, and nothing here reads their messages on your behalf. If your child has an account and is in a family conversation, the ordinary rules of that conversation apply to them the same way they apply to everybody else in it.
We are telling you that rather than letting four reassuring cards imply otherwise. A parent who assumes a supervision feature exists, because a page was written to sound like it might, is worse off than one who knows it does not.
The rules that will govern all of this are being written into our child safety and privacy documents now, against POPIA and GDPR, and read by a lawyer. They cover what a family may record about a child, who may see it, and what a person can ask for once they are grown. When those are published they will be the binding version, and where they differ from this page they will be what counts.
What Is Not Collected
Nothing Is Gathered From Anywhere Else
What is in your child's record is what a member of your family put there. We do not go and find material about your family somewhere else to fill in the gaps.
No record is bought in. Nothing is matched against a public profile to make a child's page look more complete.
Ask Before You Join
If This Does Not Answer It, Ask
A question about your own child is not a support ticket. Write, and a person answers.
Privacy & data requests
Questions about a child's record, and requests to change or remove one.
[email protected]Custodianship covers the wider question of who decides what happens to a family's record, including the people who cannot speak for themselves. Safety lists the controls that govern every family space, not only a child's.