CLARA Standards was founded on a simple premise: children's digital safety requires independent voices — people who understand how these platforms actually work, who don't depend on tech industry funding, and who can speak plainly about what's broken and what can fix it.
CLARA Standards (nonprofit, EIN 41-4174040) and CLARA PBC (public benefit corporation, EIN 41-3927635) are structurally separate entities. CLARA PBC was incorporated in New Jersey in 2026; CLARA Standards' nonprofit registration in NJ is pending.
Anneke is a behavioral and computational social scientist. Before founding CLARA Standards, she spent nearly seven years at Meta, with her final two years focused on cross-platform age assurance research across Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp. That experience showed her that technical and behavioral influences on child safety must be studied together — and that the work must be done independently of the industry it evaluates.
Zack leads all technical development for CLARA Standards, including the Digital Safety Companion app, platform scoring infrastructure, and the data systems underlying CLARA Standards' research work. He holds a Master of Applied Positive Psychology (MAPP) from the University of Pennsylvania — an unusual combination of engineering and developmental science that shapes how CLARA Standards' tools are built.
Why CLARA?
Klara in this story is an “Artificial Friend” — a solar-powered robot designed to be a companion for children. What makes Klara remarkable isn't her intelligence; it's her devotion.
Klara watches. She observes the child in her care with patience and attention, learning what brings joy and what causes harm. She is self-critical, constantly revising her understanding, questioning her assumptions, adjusting her approach. She defers to the parents' wishes while holding the child's best interests at her core. She doesn't seek to replace human connection; she seeks to support it.
This is what apps for children should be like: a kind, thoughtful, safe companion or place to connect with friends and interests, to explore, with boundaries that adjust with age. Where children are watched carefully but not intrusively. An app that revises its strategy based on what it learns about the child, that respects parental guidance, and always — always — centers the child's wellbeing.
CLARA Standards exists because most apps today are not Klara. They don't watch carefully — they optimize for engagement. They don't defer to parents — they set them up as police officers, as adversaries, and they revise more based on what keeps kids coming back than what is in their best interest.
To be clear: we don't believe children should be spied on. Privacy matters, and kids deserve it too. But privacy and safety are not opposites. A parent is almost always the only person who knows a child well enough to keep them safe — and children can't always recognize for themselves what is harming them. The answer is not surveillance, and it is not leaving kids alone with systems built to exploit them. It is giving parents real insight and the tools to guide — with boundaries that ease as a child grows.
And the systems that claim to help are failing. In our own assessments, we have found that platform safety and parental supervision features are too often poorly built, hard to find, or easily bypassed. They rarely give parents a real way to supervise that keeps a child safe while still allowing the age-appropriate freedom kids need to explore, connect, and grow. Safety and autonomy get treated as a trade-off — when they should be designed together.
We named ourselves CLARA because we believe algorithms and systems for kids — whether social media, gaming, messaging, or AI — can be better. Our standards define what “better” looks like — and our certification tells families which systems actually get there.
CLARA stands for Certification Lab for App Risk Assessment — but the name is also a reminder of what we're building toward.
It's also how we approach our own work. Our rating methodology is self-critical and constantly revised — thoughtful, imaginative, and built in partnership with academic researchers, developmental scientists, and child-safety experts. We watch carefully, we question our assumptions, and we publish what we find. We want to be the friend that guides parents and kids.
Current Work & Affiliations
Collaborators & Affiliations
Independence & Ethics
CLARA Standards operates as two separate legal entities: a nonprofit (registration pending in NJ) that conducts all research, scoring, and advocacy, and a public benefit corporation (PBC) that builds consumer products like the Reclaim & Rewire mentorship app. The nonprofit's research can never be edited, delayed, or suppressed by the PBC — or by any funder, partner, or platform we evaluate.
Our Ethical Research Constitution makes this binding: we pre-register studies before collecting data, open-source our methods, publish all findings regardless of who they implicate, and disclose every conflict of interest. No tech company funds our work. No funder gets to see results before the public does. If we find something uncomfortable, we publish it anyway.