Car design must go further to protect children (How does the car protect your child in 2026?)

On 8th June, the UK Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, told London Tech Week that tech brands have until September to block explicit images on children's phones or face legislation forcing them to. Later that day, at its Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple previewed child-safety features for iOS 27: child accounts; permission before opening a new website; time limits by app category; and content detection that now reaches past nudity into gore and violence. This follows Australia banning social media for under-16s in December 2025, and Greece, which will bar under-15s from 2027 and is pressing for an EU-wide age limit that France and Spain are already moving towards. Governments have stopped telling parents to manage this alone and started requiring companies to build the protection in.

All of this centres on the phone. Cars currently do little about the digital privacy and online safety of children, and there is latent demand for them to, so there is marked opportunity for UX design to respond and add real customer value.

For decades the car has been the most safety-regulated space a child is put in. First though crash structures, then innovations such as ISOFIX and more recently Child Presence Detection systems, which Euro NCAP now rewards, have made the protection of a child occupant - from physical harm - a key attribute of a ‘safe’ vehicle, and one brands have sought to built their identity upon. But now the cabin is full of screens with access to messaging, video content, gaming, app stores and voice assistants, and being watched by internal cameras and sensors also, so what a child needs protecting from inside it has changed. A child in the back of a connected car has much the same access to content as a child holding a phone, and yet almost none of the scrutiny now landing on the phone has reached the car.

Some auto brands are now addressing privacy concerns in hardware design. Several Chinese brands fit a physical shutter over the cabin camera (see below, the Geely M9), and Samsung’s privacy display, launched earlier this year on the Galaxy S26 Ultra, and being offered to automakers now also, can stop specific areas of the screen from being viewed from a particular angle.

The car also already knows who is inside it. Pleos Connect, Hyundai’s new infotainment system, features the Gleo AI assistant, which can understand which seat a voice command comes from. The Li Auto i6 (below) goes further on content, curating what a child sees on the front and rear passenger displays.

There is a risk that the car is on the same path as the phone, filling with cameras and sensors and collecting more data without offering a clear tangible benefit. Turning the car into a digital nanny that watches the child will be rejected by many families as needless surveillance.

What is missing is a brand that designs these scattered parts into something a parent recognises and operates from the driver's seat. The automotive OEM’s core business does not depend on a child’s attention the way that consumer tech, social media or digital entertainment (on-line video, gaming) does. Every control those companies add works against the screen time their model needs, which is why parents are right to distrust them. A car brand carries no such conflict, which gives it room to make privacy and digital safety part of what it stands for. The opportunity is to design a cabin that protects the people inside it and leaves them in control of it.

How far to stretch this is a question of brand. Apple has made privacy its cornerstone outside China and accepts fewer features for it; other consumer tech brands use more of the customer’s data to offer more capable assistants. No car brand will accept being the unsafe one, so the question is how visibly it builds the private, child-aware cabin into what it stands for. A brand with safety in its heritage could stretch it furthest; a more tech-led brand could push personalisation whilst leaving the customer in clear control of the data sharing that enables it.

Regulation will reach the car too, in Western markets likely as brands inherit the obligations that come with Android Automotive and CarPlay. They can wait and have privacy specified for them, or get ahead of it. The car has protected children’s bodies for half a century. The brand that extends that promise to their digital lives and their data, and can show it has, takes a position no technology giant can match.