Find secret apps your teen is hiding on their phone

As they get older and earn more freedom, it can get hard to keep eyes on your child all the time. Now technology is making it easier for some to cover their tracks. CBS Local 2 stands for you with information on how to prevent and identify the apps coming between your child and good behavior.

The average teenager spends nine hours a day consuming media. Much of that time is on Snapchat, Whatsapp and Instagram.

“I feel like so many parents have no idea what their kids are doing,” said La Quinta High School senior Lexi Christmas. Especially when it comes to what they’re hiding in plain sight right on their phones.

She showed off a popular app that looks like it comes as a stock feature of her iPhone. “So this is the regular calculator app. No tricks about it,” she pointed out. “Then you open up this one,” she said, pointing to a nearly identical looking app, “and you have to put in your private passcode, and then you can unlock all of these different things.” She shows off a hidden contacts list, internet browser, and albums for notes and photos.

They’re known as secret, vault or ghost apps. Christmas showed off some some she’s seen other people use. Most are free.

According to App Annie, a mobile analytics company, two of the top ten most downloaded photo and video apps on the iPhone are “secret” apps.

“Kids can hide all the stuff that they don’t want to show their parents,” explained Christmas.

CBS Local 2’s investigation revealed dozens of images and videos from students across the area from secret Instagram accounts, known as “Finsta,” or “Fake Instagram.”

Material too graphic to show on television of illegal drug use, minors having sex, driving while drinking, all supposedly “hidden” in vault apps, or in a private “Finsta” account, then screenshotted, and texted around school.

The good news here? La Quinta High School recently became the first school in California to utilize the anonymous reporting tool PSST World, an early intervention approach to making digital choices that seems to be working.

Principal Cook described what students did just two weeks ago in the name of learning about good media use. “We decided to stop all instruction for the day, and celebrate digital citizenship.”

But the hardest work has to come at home. Christmas said the kids she knows who use fake Instagram accounts or vault apps are “The type that are going to have stricter parents where they’re not going to have as open of a relationship”

Cook agrees. “If we talk to our kids ahead of time and say, I know this is out there, I hope you don’t have one…” Then go a step further. “Now you have to have that conversation, show me your fake (account)…the best offense is a good defense, right?”

How much time are local kids spending on their phones?

La Quinta High School English teacher Meredith Wheeler asked her students to track their phone usage in general, and specific to social media.

Roughly 75 16 and 17-year old juniors recorded their time spent passively consuming media. Wheeler wanted her students to see how they could make it a more positive and productive experience for their life, as well as the lives of others.

So what did they find?

Students averaged 51.5 hours over one week immersed in mass media, including Netflix, social media, texting, and computers.

Students averaged 30.5 hours over one week using their phones for social media.

Now Wheeler is taking the data one step further and asking students to post their accomplishments using the hashtag #gritittogether as a nod to the concepts of Angela Duckworth and Carol Dweck, who encourage the process of perseverance through obstacles.

How much time do you spend on your phone or social media?