Ontaro: Child Safetyin a Digital World

After witnessing firsthand the dangers of social media for the younger generation,  Tony Paskin set out to save lives, open conversations and make the digital world as safe as we can for those we love.

For all the positives – accessible education, communication tools, creative outlets – there’s a whole load of negatives. Bullying, child suicide, drugs, alcohol, racism, violence, grooming and sexual content. The online world is a scary place to let your kids roam freely. 

Tony wanted to create a fully functioning parental control monitoring system which protects children against malicious online interactions. Five years since his ‘aha!’ moment and he hadn’t found someone he could trust to develop a robust, visually appealing, functional app and system which used artificial intelligence to intercept and detect harmful interactions.

A sophisticated native mobile monitoring solution which runs silently on android devices. Aimed at parents, teachers, and caregivers as a Safeguarding tool, Ontaro’s modern web SaaS (Software as a service) portal allows parents to view and monitor their children's online usage. 

Parents don’t need to snoop on a child’s phone to keep them safe. Nor do they really want to. Instead, Ontaro’s system promotes ‘responsible use’; guardians are alerted to any sensitive and malicious content a child may come across and receive relevant website links to tools and advice to start a dialogue with them.

We did a Razor Sprint – a super short and precise process which applies technologies to specific problems – to ensure the mission’s feasibility.

Building on that, we moved onto a 4 part Discovery Phase: design & project setup, a website,  Android app & parental web app Minimum Viable Product (MVP), and finally an iOS MVP.

We held workshops to create a solution which would:

1. Provide immediate value to parents and caregivers
2. Be easily maintained
3. Be a platform upon which Ontaro can easily make future improvements

In true Razor fashion, Ontaro’s new product uses innovative tech to put people front and centre. Built with a modern tech stack, it's a scalable subscription SaaS that uses a complex guardianship system through which parents can delegate alert management to spouses, carers or schools. With integrated device heartbeats, guardians can also check if a child’s phone is still turned on. 

We achieved multi-class text classification using varying natural languages processing techniques (like BERT) to flag content, and prompt discussion via a dashboard which shows statistics and charts about the child’s internet usage. 

Oh, and we incorporated an ‘iterative improvement’ mechanism which enables parents to categorise their child’s detections, so we can retrain the machine learning model over time. 

Pretty good stuff, huh?

But we’re not done just yet. We’re developing an iOS integration, image and video classification, sentiment analysis and improved analytics, to name a few.