The 3 P’s of Child Safety Online
A quick search for ‘fastest growing crime’ would reveal that at the top of the list are different types of Internet crimes and the fastest-growing victim pool are the children. Children are getting online at an ever-younger age and the devices that they use are changing all the time.
Children are naive, unsuspecting, and hence vulnerable. Their regular parenting advice like the warning of ‘stranger danger’ gets new dimensions online making the old school advice mostly irrelevant. While online, children do get in touch with different people in multiple strange ways, many a time in totally anonymous chats.
The Internet is full of advice, both from governments and private organizations and individuals on how to handle different kinds of ‘threats’ to children. The problem with each of them is that it puts a burden on parents acting as humans where most of it should be handled by technology.
The problem is multi-dimensional and may never find a tick box solution. At SafeLabs Inc. Canada we set out on a goal to use technology in a holistic way to augment parenting in the digital age. In this effort, we created a special purpose Wi-Fi router.
‘Safety’ in the context of children’s online activities is such a broad concept. We’ve tried to summarize the complex problem into three categories and we call them ‘The 3 P’s”.
- Privacy
- Protection
- Prevention
1. Privacy
As we go online, different entities are all looking over our shoulders. The big tech trying to profile our interests, our ISPs logging a list of websites we visit, country-level firewalls trying to block some websites or applications, visited websites trying to find our location, our interests, and our contacts and so on. In special cases of child safety, online predators try to find the children in their vicinity and try to engage them, groom them, or stalk them.
We’ve divided the Privacy concerns into a few sub-categories as below and mention how SafeLabs Wi-Fi router tries to solve them or make an improvement in them.
Location Privacy
Anonymizing the location which is revealed through our public IP address. When connected through the SafeLabs Wi-Fi router, the user’s location is anonymized to some nearest data center that they choose to connect to. We have a presence in data centers in most countries of the world.
Communications Privacy
All communication is encrypted from the wi-fi router to a centralized server. If it is not there, entities in between starting from your ISP, to the country level firewalls and other intermediaries may have visibility into full or partial communications.
Browsing Privacy
When we visit a website, its domain name needs to be resolved or its IP address accessed. Our ISP provides us with their DNS server which is the first tool used by most ISPs to log what people have visited. Browsing privacy means that these requests are invisible to the ISP and are transported in an encrypted way to our centralized server where they are mixed with our requests and resolved in bulk.
Application Privacy
When we open an application like WhatsApp, Skype or any other, many intermediaries starting from our ISP know it and can potentially eavesdrop, block or throttle it. Application privacy means requests are encrypted in a way, intermediaries cannot know what application is used. As a by-product, many country-level firewalls could also be bypassed if they are restricting access.
Tracking Privacy
When a user does an activity online like clicking on an Ad or just viewing a page, it can be tracked between sessions. It also happens if you show interest in one product on one device and start seeing related Ads on all your devices. Tracking Privacy means access to sites and passing on of cookies providing such tracking is blocked.
2. Protection
While Privacy is a concern for both adults and children, ‘Protection’ is a concern addressed in SafeLabs Wi-Fi router specially for children.
Filter Adult Websites
Every day, a few tens to hundreds of new websites appear showing adult content. They all initiate their own marketing and sales, mostly with little to no regard for the age appropriateness of the receiver. Some go to criminal lengths to solicit and push their message to underage children very knowingly.
SafeLabs continuously watches out for such new appearing and blocks the websites on all our installed routers within hours of appearing.
Block Anonymous Chat Rooms
This is where strangers get in touch and tend to get bold in their conversations. Minors tend to get here mostly to satisfy their curiosity where they are unable to ask otherwise. This is where they are most vulnerable and get hooked. SafeLabs looks out for such websites and also engages the community to identify new comings and block them on all our routers as soon as they are identified.
Block Malware / Phishing Sites
These sites serve different types of software and urge unsuspecting users to install them or visit them and give their credentials. SafeLabs routers get an update of all such websites and IP addresses and block them promptly.
Bar Unsafe Search Results
Appearing in results of normal searches, this is where the click trail starts towards unruly areas.
SafeLabs Wi-Fi router instructs Google, Bing, and other major search engines to only return ‘Safe Search Results’.
Stop Obscene Ads
Such Ads keep appearing even on otherwise child-friendly websites. SafeLabs subscribes to major bodies who find such servers and we promptly block them.
3. Prevention
Privacy and protection features are fully automated and backed by our growing community engagement, carry out the bulk of the load the human caregiver needs to do otherwise.
But the router keeps processing all activity and tries to assess if there is an imminent risk that warrants sending an alert to the human caregiver.
Accessing illegal content
This is beyond the usual adult content. This is something that is expected to be out of the reach of most children unless they are in touch with something unusual.
First is SafeLabs' partnership with the Canadian Government’s Project Arachnid. This project mines for billions of images of child abuse mostly from obscure places on the dark web. A child is not expected to have access to any of these images.
Another partnership is with the UK Government’s Home Department Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism. This channel provides us with all the different types of terrorist content. This is also not expected to be accessible through any normal means.
There are other ‘illegal’ content sources that SafeLabs gathers through its growing community. If a child ever attempts to access such content, an alert is sent to its human caregiver who is then expected to resolve it further.
Accessing Dangerous Sites
Some sites and games offer challenges to children which are known to cause physical harm or even suicides. Our router keeps monitoring all such activity and alerts the human caregiver.
Product and Service Introduction
Each SafeLabs Wi-Fi router includes a high performance compute engine with advanced image processing, dedicated graphical processing units, and a neural network processor doing at least one tera operations per second of artificial intelligence.
The data, as well as the application, is updated regularly and technology deployed to mitigate that risk as appropriately as possible. If we can handle it in automation through privacy or protection, we will do it without human intervention. Otherwise, we will engage a human to ‘prevent’ any loss before it happens.
The product and its service details can be found at SafeLabs.net
