With the internet having more information for anymore to ever digest, it's really easy to lose track of what goes on on our screens. While most of us can deal with that, children are the most vulnerable.
The internet houses both good contents and bad contents, and it's common for children to be exposed to inappropriate contents.
According to Pew Research, about 1.2 million teens have sent sexually suggestive nude or nearly nude images of themselves to someone else via messaging platforms. Do Something published that 11 percent of teen girls ages 13 to 16 have been involved with sending or receiving sexually explicit messages.
For any parents out there, these statistics should be worrying.
Gallery Guardian (GG), an app created by YIPO Technologies uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to revolutionize how parents can keep an eye on their children. It's like showing while some technologies have become even more invasive to children, some can actually help.
Acting as a watchdog, the app allows parents to monitor the content on their children's mobile devices by scanning images they received, without bothering them.
Using AI's image recognition system, GG aims to improve child safety online by notifying parents every time their child takes or receives inappropriate images on any social media app.
"We built a library of pornography to train our algorithm," said Daniel Skowronski, founder and CEO of developer YIPO Technologies. "To improve the detection, we also leveraged data sets that were mostly ‘selfie’ style images, since it’s the most common photo style taken with smartphones."
While this is indeed an improvement to how we can use AI to watch over our children, it has some drawbacks.
First of all, for this to work, both the parent's and child's mobile devices must have the app installed and paired. The next drawback is that in order for the image processing system to work, the image processing is not done locally on phones. As a result, the app will result a battery drainage and excessive processing power.
And for last, children at a younger age may not notice or know about the app's presence. But how about older children? How many teens will agree to install this kind of app on their phones?
It's complicated for parents to keep their young curious children protected, unless of course, by taking away their phone. GG is an app designed “by parents for parents”. It has some disadvantages, but the whole idea here is how attempts have been made to limit underage kids from becoming preys for unknown predators on the internet.
Additionally, the app also offers resources to help teach parents how to approach a conversation that could be incredibly difficult for all parties involved.
