Safety Tech – Making The Internet A Safer Place
What does Safety Tech mean?
Safety Tech is a term that describes and defines technologies to help build safer online communities and protect users from harmful content and behavior.
“Cybersecurity focuses on protecting data, information, networks and systems. Cyber safety, or safety tech, focuses on protecting what it is to be human online. It focuses on protecting people online.” – Professor Mary Aiken, Cyberpsychologist
In recent years, the term has gained more recognition as part of the debate by governments around the world to legislate online safety to protect, particularly, children and vulnerable adults from harmful and inappropriate content.
Governments in the UK, Europe and the USA are formulating new regulations which will determine where responsibilities lie for the governance and rapid removal of user-generated content that is illegal or deemed offensive or harmful to the wider public. These regulations will affect all organizations that provide platforms for user engagement and interaction online.
What is Safety Tech?
Safety Tech encompasses a range of products and services that help organizations keep their users free from harm when accessing the internet.
They can be technologies that block illegal content, identify and remove toxic or illegal content, recognize visual, harmful material, including pornography, extremism and graphic violence in images, videos and streaming media, identify and mitigate misinformation and deliver child-safe online experiences. Safety Tech solutions also safeguard platforms, devices and networks.
Why is Safety Tech important?
The explosion of online platforms and use of applications have drastically changed the way we live our lives. Our connected world evolves around apps to chat, shop, book holidays, pay bills and more. Young people in particular share their lives by constantly uploading pictures, sharing and posting comments.
While the social aspect can be positive and life-enhancing, being online also presents opportunities that can be exploited by those with entirely different, darker motives.
This is a reason why content moderation is one of the biggest challenges for organizations today. As more and more users engage on online platforms, moderating the sheer amount of content has become too overwhelming for teams of human moderators to cope.
“The risk of young people being harmed by toxic content they encounter online is too great for a single platform operator to tackle on its own, or to build from scratch. By collaborating with Image Analyzer we can block offensive live-streamed video at unprecedented levels and make online communities safer.”
CEO and founder of a North American online
gaming content moderation company
How does Safety Tech work?
Safety Tech works by identifying, classifying, and removing illegal content, and images and videos that are deemed harmful to users, especially children, and vulnerable adults.
How does Image Analyzer contribute to Safety Tech?
Image Analyzer provides artificial intelligence-based content moderation technology for image, video and streaming media, including live-streamed footage uploaded by users.
We protect both, organizations and users. At the organizational level, our AI content moderation technology minimizes corporate legal risk exposure, protects brand reputation and complies with safeguarding regulations caused by employees or users abusing their digital platform access to share harmful visual material. Our technology has been designed to identify visual risks in milliseconds, including illegal content, and images and videos that are deemed harmful to users, especially children and vulnerable adults. We help organizations provide a safe, positive user experience for those accessing the internet.
Watch how Image Analyzer works in this short video
Online Safety Tech Industry Association (OSTIA)
We are a member of the Online Safety Tech Industry Association (OSTIA) and won the Best Emerging Technology in AI category of the Computing AI & Machine Learning Awards 2021.
Image Analyzer wins UK Government Safety Tech
Challenge Fund grant
Image Analyzer wins the UK Government Safety Tech Challenge Fund grant to develop Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM)-detection technology for end-to-end encrypted services using its AI-powered visual content moderation technology in partnership with Galaxkey and Yoti.
“Image Analyzer is delighted to be collaborating with Galaxkey and Yoti to deliver this exciting, first-of-a-kind technology pilot that recognizes the importance of protecting users’ data and privacy whilst addressing the inherent risks to children associated with end-to-end encryption. As a ground-breaking technology collaboration, the Galaxkey, Yoti and Image Analyzer solution will enable users to access all of the benefits related to encryption whilst enabling clean data streams and offering reassurance within specific use case scenarios such as educational sharing.”
– Cris Pikes, CEO and founder of Image Analyzer
How can Image Analyzer’s Safety Tech solution be implemented?
We have been utilizing AI content moderation technology since 2014 in the way that is now known as Edge AI.
Today, our technology is available and can be deployed as a cloud service, cloud instance, virtual appliance or as a SDK. Please contact us to find out more or to see a demo.
Does Safety Tech make the internet safer?
Yes. By using innovative technologies such as Image Analyzer’s AI-powered content moderation technology organizations will be able to better cope with the huge volume posed by user-driven content posted to digital platforms and the internet. Making the internet a safer place for everyone.
What is the future of Safety Tech?
Governments and industries continue to work in partnership to develop and improve technology solutions. An example of how driving innovation and encouraging industry collaboration can look like in reality is the UK Government’s Safety Tech Challenge Fund. The aim of this fund is to find new ways to detect Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) sent via encrypted channels, without compromising citizens’ privacy. Image Analyzer is collaborating with content encryption technology provider Galaxkey, and digital identity and age verification technology company, Yoti, to develop AI-powered visual content analysis technology that works within messaging services that employ end-to-end encryption.
Read our blogs on Safety Tech
Download our whitepapers to find out how Safety Tech legislation will affect your organization and how you can prepare for it.
Image Analyzer commissioned whitepapers written by specialist technology sector law firm Bird & Bird. The whitepapers are written in clear, jargon-free language, provide an overview of the law and summarize the key points.
UK Legislation Whitepaper
The UK Online Safety Bill proposes to give Ofcom the power to sanction online platform operators and interactive website owners that fail to remove illegal content, as well as legal, but harmful content. All platform operators will have a duty of care to protect children who use their services. Organizations failing to protect people face fines of up to 10% of turnover, or the blocking of their sites. The UK government will also reserve the power for senior managers to be held liable.
EU Legislation Whitepaper
The EU Digital Services Act (DSA) proposes that any platform that is used by more than 10%, or 45 million members of the European population is deemed ‘systemic’ and therefore has a duty to oversee the content posted by users. Under the DSA regulation, Digital Services Coordinators will gain the power to directly sanction platform operators who fail to oversee content posted by rogue traders, traffickers, pornographers, and extremists and will be empowered to impose penalties of 6% of global turnover in the preceding year. It is anticipated that the DSA will come into force in 2023.
Safety Tech from Image Analyzer
With our AI-powered automated content moderation technology,
organizations can:
- Provide a safe and positive user experience
- Protect brand reputation
- Prevent revenue loss
- Reduce legal liability
- Protect human moderator's mental well-being
For your Safety Tech needs, contact us today.
