Ask Sam letter

Hi there,

It’s good to hear that you feel comfortable looking at our site.

It's okay for parents to want to make sure you are safe online and they might want to check out which websites you’ve been visiting. This means that if you want to visit ChildLine, it might make it hard to hide from them. We want you to feel able to visit us online without worrying that someone will know about it so we have some simple things you can do to hide your visit.

Most browsers have a “private” mode – in Chrome it is called Incognito, in Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer it is called Private Browsing. You can usually open a private browsing window by selecting it from the menu. When visiting ChildLine in a private browsing window, it won’t leave any traces that you’ve been here.
If you can’t do this, or have visited us in a normal window and want to hide that, you can also do things like delete your browsing history and clear any cookies. You can find out more about how to do this on our page called cover your tracks.

Visiting ChildLine through your phone can be a little different and will vary depending on which phone you have. Most phone browsers have the private browsing option, but if not you could always use a computer that’s more private. Sometimes more private might mean using a public computer like a library as your parents would have less control over that.

I hope that helps, remember that calls to ChildLine are always free and don’t show up on the phone bill. The only thing you need to do to hide your call to ChildLine is to clear the recently dialled numbers from the phone itself.

Take care
Sam