The researchers best positioned to evaluate child safety systems are the same ones structurally prevented from doing so — held back by employment contracts, publication restrictions, and the basic conflict between platform revenue and honest findings. Researchers outside platforms often don't know what to measure. Those inside can't say what they find. CLARA was founded to hold the position neither can.
CLARA Standards (nonprofit, EIN 41-4174040) and CLARA PBC (public benefit corporation, EIN 41-3927635) are structurally separate entities, incorporated in New Jersey in 2026.
“The system of children's digital lives needs to be broken and rebuilt — not just its age gates and safety controls, but the fundamental design of the apps themselves. That requires data, independent expertise, families, and policy moving together. The window for that is open right now.”
Anneke is a behavioral and computational social scientist. Before founding CLARA, 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 work produced a core insight driving everything CLARA does: technical and behavioral influences on child safety must be studied together, using a mixed-methods approach — surveys, interviews, synthetic red team testing, and consented behavioral data — and that work must be done independently of the industry it evaluates to be trustworthy.
Her earlier work at Meta, on ranking and recommendation systems, gave her direct visibility into how algorithms identify child users before platforms formally acknowledge them. She left to build what the industry structurally cannot build itself: independent measurement, practical safety standards, and tools that give children genuine agency rather than managed exposure.
Her academic background spans computational social science and the measurement of wellbeing, trust, and empathy at scale. At UPenn's World Well-Being Project, working with Martin Seligman, she pioneered computational approaches to measuring psychological states from language data and created the first public empathy and trust lexica.
Courtney built TikTok's product risk models — specifically the calculator that evaluated safety exposure across features before launch. She led the policy assessments that translated behavioral risk into engineering requirements. Her institutional knowledge of where platform safety policy breaks down — where intent meets engineering and loses — is exactly what external evaluators rarely have.
Zack leads all technical development for CLARA, including the Tech Wellness Trainer plugin, red team testing infrastructure, and the data systems underlying CLARA's evaluation work. He holds a Master of Applied Positive Psychology (MAPP) from the University of Pennsylvania — an unusual combination of engineering depth and developmental science that shapes how CLARA's tools are built.