When my kids were young, in a pre-smartphone era, we worried about what trouble they might fall into online. So we installed an app called Child Web Guardian to monitor and filter their Internet browsing.
Unfortunately for two busy parents, the app produced voluminous activity logs we didn’t have time to review carefully. It also required frequent adult intervention to unblock web sites needed for school projects and whatnot.
And even the youngest teenagers were tech savvy enough to escape the app’s protections eventually. “It’s how I learned what a VPN was,” my twenty-six-year-old daughter recalls.
Today, the challenges have evolved, and thanks to smartphones are likely even more troublesome and addictive now. But solutions have also improved.
Two years ago, Hari Ravichandran, chief executive of Aura, Boston’s leading consumer cybersecurity company, had his eyes opened to the downsides of smartphones. One of his four kids had what he described as a “fairly rough” personal incident (which he understandably doesn’t want to reveal much about).
Like many parents, Ravichandran’s tech strategy for his kids had been to encourage responsible use but not meddle too much.
“We were about agency for the kids, privacy, we never actually looked at their phones,” he said. But after the incident, “unless we look at her phone, it’s not clear to me how we’re going to actually find out what’s going through her mind. And at the same time, I don’t want to invade her privacy, especially as she’s getting older.”
Unable to find a trustworthy app that could help, Ravichandran decided Aura could beef up an existing cybersecurity offering to address the monitoring challenge. The company consulted with child clinicians, psychiatrists, and psychologists at Boston Children’s Hospital to design the app to find the most critical behavioral warning signs of a kid in trouble.
Rolling out over the first half of the year, the newly enhanced Aura tools, which start at $32 per month for a family, use the latest artificial intelligence tech to combine extensive monitoring of a kid’s phone activities with summarized reports for parents. The goal is to provide warnings about unhealthy behavior while maintaining the kids’ sense of privacy.
For example, the AI monitors chats for word patterns, tones, and emotional expressions to detect signs of stress and unhealthy feelings. It also provides reports about how much various apps are used and at what times of day.
“Nighttime device habits could use improvement,” the app reported in one example exchange the company provided. “Emma’s online activity could interfere with their ability to get enough consistent, quality sleep. Keep an eye out for ways to improve.”
“It’s no substitute for parenting,” Ravichandran said. “It’s simply a tool that has the ability to give you insights into the online life of your child, which is a real blind spot for parents.”
In the future, the feature could be extended to help caregivers monitor phone use of elderly relatives as well.
Outside experts said the new features sounded potentially useful but not as a replacement for involved parenting. And generative AI technology is far from perfect at this point and could miss some warning signs, they said.
“Tools like this should just be a starting point for conversations,” said clinical psychologist Margaret Morris, who studies adolescent well-being and the impact of technology.
Parents should get in the habit of talking about whatever reports the software creates, Morris recommended. “The primary focus of the conversations should be on kids’ social relationships, interests, worries and how they are feeling about themselves,” she said.
Studies of adolescent behavior have found that restrictive parenting strategies are more closely correlated with problematic Internet use than strategies relying on active and open discussion, according to Linda Charmaraman, a senior research scientist at the Wellesley Centers for Women. Getting an AI summary may be “helpful…but it doesn’t replace the need to have ongoing discussions with youth about what they are seeing and how they are reacting,” she said.
As a top tech startup in Boston, Aura is already growing quickly with its existing consumer cybersecurity protection apps, which cover everything from blocking spam to credit monitoring to classic computer virus scanning. Annual recurring revenue hit $165 million and the company is looking to become profitable within the next two years, Ravichandran said.
Last year, the six-year-old company took over sponsorship of the 1,500-seat pavilion level at Fenway Park from Boston financial titan State Street Corp. This week, Aura also started advertising on the high-profile billboards inside South Station.
And on Monday, the company announced it had raised another $140 million of backing from investors including California VC firm Ten Eleven Ventures, Walton family firm Madrone Capital, and AT&T Ventures. The funds will go toward hiring more software engineers and child safety experts as well as finding new partners to sell Aura’s software with the new child monitoring features.
“Now we can go potentially talk to schools, for example, we can go talk to clinicians and psychologists and psychiatrists,” Ravichandran said. “this can open up a lot more distribution.”
Aaron Pressman can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him @ampressman.
发表回复