SKAMP: Safeguard Kids and Maintain Privacy

Safeguard youth from innapproriate content, cyber bullying, grooming, violence, mental health and risky behaviors.

The dinner-time conversation has continued for months now. Your pre-teen wants a cell phone. All of her friends have one, and she feels left out. You and your partner have been discussing the possibility and are close to a purchase decision. Still, one major stumbling block remains: how to protect your child from harm in our increasingly connected metaverse. You trust your child and do not want to spy on them. After all, the middle and high school years are a time for growth and exploration. At the same time, the potential for emotional, psychological, and physical harm that originates via internet communication is real. Every day there is a report about human trafficking, school shootings, or teen suicide due to cyberbullying. How can you keep your child safe while still protecting their privacy?

Safeguard Kids and Maintain Privacy (SKAMP) is a parental control and supervision app that monitors a child’s cell phone. It performs location tracking, creates activity reports, and monitors text for cyberbullying, adult strangers or child predators, suicide ideation, self-harm, disordered eating, depression, alcohol and substance use, sexual content, violence, inappropriate content, risky behaviors, physical injuries, and exposing personal information like addresses and cell phone numbers. If harm to a child is detected, SKAMP will alert the parents immediately and help them make informed decisions on how to address the issue.

We are leveraging machine learning technologies to develop a new kind of parental control app that will alert parents in cases of imminent harm while preserving the child’s privacy. The proven technology that forms the foundation of the SKAMP machine learning algorithm was developed through close analysis of the communicative patterns of teens and tweens. SKAMP can achieve accuracy rates of over 80% for sexual predation and can filter out more than 95% of harmless content.

Importantly, respect the privacy of our users - both parents and children. The SKAMP app runs a lightweight algorithm on the child's phone. When the algorithm detects a problem, it will send only the portions of the conversation that triggered our proprietary alert system to the parent via secure channels. Parents can mark alerts as useful or non-useful on a per-child basis, thus customizing the algorithm to reflect each family's values. The child's data will remain secure on the device and never be to sent to a third-party website for processing or storage.