Saving Seconds

By: Damien Patton

Saving seconds is at the heart of Banjo’s work with our nation’s first responders — helping them identify emergencies, reduce response times, and save lives. We use existing data streams and report emergency events as they happen in real time through our single service, Live Time.

In the real world, Live Time helps:

• Discover accidents and alert first responders minutes before the first 911 call.
• Provide live information so emergency vehicles can get to the scene faster and ambulances get patients to hospitals with the right resources faster.
• Detect dangerous road conditions so the public can be alerted.
• Notify schools of emergencies nearby that could endanger children’s safety.

I am proud of not just what we can do today, but who we are as a company.

We have evolved since I founded Banjo in 2010 as a social media company dedicated to connecting users with their friends. A few years later, inspired by the speed of information on social media, we became a news company focused on helping people make more informed decisions faster.

Today, we are neither — we are a company that is dedicated to strengthening public safety.

We’ve learned a lot about privacy since our founding and we’ve spent significant resources to build privacy protections into our technology. Even as a social media company, we developed safeguards into our system to ensure social media posts shared in private were never made public, and we began to develop advanced privacy patents.

We never sold user data, and any data we had as a social media company was deleted when we shuttered that business and shut down those apps.

We had watched other startups treat privacy like a game and mishandle user data. While they monopolized and monetized users, we built privacy protections in our technology.

At the core of Banjo’s Live Time service is a belief that leveraging technology does not require — nor should it allow — trampling on individuals’ civil liberties — every citizen’s right to privacy must be respected and protected. That is why privacy is built into every technology we use at Live Time.

Our service uses sophisticated artificial intelligence and advanced processing to make sense of data in real time and to get the best information to the right decision makers and life savers.

While we use cutting-edge technology we have not, do not, nor ever will use facial recognition nor other invasive technologies to collect data. All data processed by our system is anonymized. We delete any photos or videos and only retain a small set of anonymized data that helps us refine our technologies to better recognize and spot emergencies. We have strict limits on who can access our data internally. We do not use technology to surveil or monitor individuals and communities — we scan for emergencies to alert the right first responders so they can deploy the best resources.

We take our mission to save lives and reduce human suffering seriously. And we take privacy just as seriously, which is why we have a multi-layered approach to preserve everyone’s privacy while assisting first responders. This includes industry-leading technologies and patents that remove personal identifiable information and safeguard data, and include strict contract language around how we partner with public agencies.

And, in a stark contrast to most tech companies, we have plainly said that any company working with the public sector should be subject to audits, oversight and regulation.

Our goal is to get this right and be an example of how companies can get artificial intelligence right — harnessing its ability to make sense of data and deliver it in a way that helps people.