Wave Watch™Wave Watch™ is Shaka Surf’s proprietary content filtering engine. It reads each page as it loads in Shaka Surf, decides whether to let it through, warn, or cover it, and shows you the result in Shaka Safe as a short timeline with flags.
Shaka Safewhere Wave Watch™ lands
The timeline has waves, flags and asks. Most days you read it in a glance.
The sites your kid surfed, grouped into a timeline. Enough to know where the afternoon went.
Anything Wave Watch™ warned about or covered, with the reason and a short snippet to help you get a sense of why. Your kid sees the flag, but may not see the exact reason.
“Ask to surf here” requests, one tap to approve. Say yes and the tile appears in Shaka Surf. Say not yet and they can ask again another day.
Wave Watch™ looks at the page itself, not just the address, so it can tell a museum from a marketplace even when both use the same words. It picks one of four outcomes, and each one gets its own flag on the timeline.
Wave Watch™ took a look and let the page through. Most of the timeline is rows like this, and most carry no flag at all.
Every age levelSomething borderline. Wave Watch™ put a heads-up over the page, said why, and let them choose whether to keep surfing. The row tells you which they chose.
Shows as “Warned, kept surfing”Adult content, found on the page itself. Wave Watch™ covered the page, told them why, and gave them a button to ask you.
Shows as “Wave Watch™ covered a page”The site never loaded, because it sits inside a No Surf Zone or outside their allowed sites. Nothing to see, and the row says so.
Shows as “Held”Adult content is always blocked for every level. That’s non-negotiable.
For everything else (profanity, gambling, violence, etc.), it varies by the age level you select.
A Squid (ages 5-9) has very strict filtering. A Charger (ages 15+) mostly gets a flag and a conversation. Whatever the level, your kid saw the flag and the reason before you did, and they’re encouraged to start a conversation with you.
Every page gets read for these eight categories as it loads. Adult content is covered at every age. For the rest, how strict Wave Watch™ leans depends on the age level you pick.
Porn and other adult content. Covered at every age, no exceptions.
Coarse language, weighed by how much of it there is, so one stray word never trips a page.
Buying, dealing and glamorising drugs, including the vape and pill culture aimed at kids.
Gore, real death videos, and instructions for making weapons.
Bets and betting sites, plus the skin and Robux gambling that targets kids.
Slurs used as weapons, calls to violence, and the groups behind them.
Methods, instructions and content that encourages it, plus abuse like “kys”. Recovery and support pages stay clear.
Pirated movies, games and software, and the sites that push malware and scams along with them.
Your kid opens Shaka Surf and goes wherever their age level allows. Each site is a “wave.”
Each page gets read as it loads. Most go straight through. Depending on age level, a borderline page gets a warning (sports article with gambling mentioned), an adult page gets covered, and the reason shows on their screen in kid-safe verbiage.
Waves, flags and asks land on the timeline in Shaka Safe. Approve an ask, read a flag, or do nothing at all. Most days it’s a ten-second look.
Once a week you get a plain-words summary: where they surfed, what they asked, what got flagged.
Once a week, the Tide Report sums the week up in a few plain lines: where they surfed, what they asked for, what got flagged. A calm week reads as a calm week.
Wave Watch™ is not spyware. It reads the pages your kid opens in Shaka Surf on their device alone, and that is all it reads. It doesn’t read messages, record the screen or track location, and it doesn’t hide. There is no internet configuration. Your kid simply needs to use the Shaka Surf app as their primary browser.
The first screen your kid ever sees in Shaka Surf explains exactly what their lifeguard can see. When you promote them to a new age level, you do it out loud. When something gets flagged, they saw the reason before you did. There are no secrets in either direction, and that’s what keeps a kid surfing in the water you can see, instead of on a friend’s phone where you can’t.
Yes, it shows you the sites they surfed, grouped into a timeline, with a flag on anything Wave Watch™ warned about, covered or held. It’s short enough to read in a glance, and the weekly Tide Report sums it up.
Wave Watch™ reads each page as it loads. Depending on the age level (Grom and Charger only), a borderline page gets a warning: a heads-up over the page with the reason, and your kid chooses whether to keep surfing. An adult page gets covered: it’s blocked, the reason is shown in kid-friendly language, and they can ask you to open it if it seems like a mistake. Each outcome gets its own flag on the timeline, yellow for warned, red for covered, and held rows say so.
Yes. The first screen your kid sees in Shaka Surf explains exactly what their lifeguard can see. There’s no hidden mode.
No. It doesn’t read messages, record the screen or track location. It reads the pages your kid opens in Shaka Surf, and it shows the waves, the flags and the asks to both of you.
The request shows up in Shaka Safe with the site they want and the reason they gave, if they added one. You can say yes once, for an hour, or for good, all with one tap, and it opens in Shaka Surf. Or say not now, and they can ask again another day.
No. Your kid’s age level already covers plenty of water on its own. You only hear about requests for sites outside what their current age level allows.
No. There are intentionally no third-party advertising or analytics tools built into the kid app. Shaka is family owned and self-funded. We have no incentive to collect or sell data from you or your family, other than to make the best, most useful products for you.
Yes. With Screen Time access, Shaka Surf can remove or block the other browsers on your kid’s device, so all of their browsing goes through Shaka Surf. You can also make Shaka Surf the default browser, so links from other apps open in it too.
Wave Watch™ keeps checking. It reads a page every time it loads, not once, so a news site that suddenly publishes an inappropriate article gets covered as soon as that story loads on the page.
Join the waitlist and you’ll get one email the day Shaka Safe lands on the App Store, and a short note now and then before that.
