Submitted 8 years, 4 months, 11 hours, and 9 minutes Ago
I'm very pleased to announce the release of SaferKid, a radical, proactive approach to keeping bullies, predators and sexting away from children and teens.
SaferKid was conceived after thinking a lot about the issue of child sexual assault. Last year I worked on an app for survivors of sexual assault, and I learned that 44% of sexual assault victims are under 18. In the process of working on that, I spoke to many sexual assault survivors (mostly women). All but one of them told a story of being assaulted as a minor.
A few months later, I came across an article about a 13 year-old girl who was sexually assaulted by a man she met on an app, and I started thinking about the problem of sex crimes against children on apps.
In doing this, I was saddened to see how big this problem is. There are now 3,000 federal, state and local government agencies that work on tracking, arresting and convicting perpetrators of these crimes. Their activities are coordinated by 61 Regional Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) Task Forces, a remarkable team that hopefully no parent will ever have to encounter. But if you do, you will be so thankful for the remarkable men and women there.
In part of researching the problem, I spoke with several people who work for ICAC. One officer, in a town of 70,000 people, told me that he could make an arrest everyday if he had the manpower. In part, this is because these crimes happen across jurisdictions, with perpetrators driving from one town or city to another to meet victims. But it's a big problem. Shockingly big. And the impact of every crime can be a lifetime of recovery for a child.
A better answer, it seems to us, is to create a system that keeps the crimes from happening in the first place, preventing the crimes entirely. This is what SaferKid is designed to do. To understand how it works, it's helpful to understand how these situations develop:
Children and teens want to explore the world, and so, they download apps that are marketed in a nice friendly way and experiment with them. They start having conversations with people, and these conversations turn into situations where, after a period of time, the child or teen starts trusting an adult. This process is called grooming. And then eventually that turns into a sexual conversation and a plan is made to meet up.
Our solution is to track all the apps where minors can meet strangers (either by design or because the security barriers make it easy for minors to pretend to be adults) and alert parents when children or teens have them on their phones. This is important because kids can have dozens or hundreds of apps, and parents generally have no idea what they all do. And you can't tell what a child is doing on an iPhone most of the time. Messaging a stranger looks the same as messaging a friend. And after a couple of days, children and teens think of these people as friends.
So, at SaferKid, we set out to do was comb the App Store for all the apps that allow people to meet strangers. This is where the problem starts, because young people get these apps and start talking to someone. There are a lot of these apps. In fact, 30 of the top 200 social networking apps are primarily for meeting strangers, and there are tens of thousands of apps in the social networking category alone. Just going through them all and staying up to speed is a gargantuan task.
In parallel, we built a system to check what apps are on a child's phone approximately once a day. We then compare this to all the apps for meeting strangers, and if we find one, we notify the parents. Parents can then use our Parent's Guides and App Ratings and Reviews to talk to their child about the app and head any issues off at the pass. They may have spoken about not meeting strangers online before, but now it's really time to have the conversation. And this allows parents to intervene, proactively, removing their child or teen (the potential victim) from the app BEFORE anything develops.
As we combed the App Store, we found a lot of apps parents need to know about. And not all are for meeting strangers. Some have mechanics for bullying. Some have sexting risks. Some are too violent for small children. Some are indicators of possible drug use. And some have other issues. Overall, we found 202,787 that parents ought to know if their children have (depending on age).
And so, this is SaferKid: We keep an eye on what apps your child or teen gets and notify you if it's one of these apps of concern. We tell you what to be concerned about, why it's inappropriate (given your child's age) and how to talk to your child about it. It's a proactive parenting tool for all kinds of situations that lets you be a better parent and guide. And it covers 202,787 apps and counting.
