An Israeli developer has created a cellphone app that is now installed on hundreds of thousands of cellphones worldwide to alert parents as to cyber-threats to their children. Keepers Child Safety was created by Hanan Lipskin, a noted software developer who trained in an IDF Cyber Unit where he specialized in encrypted communications. Prior to founding Keepers, he worked in software integration and Android App development at Cisco.
The AI-based app uses Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP)–a set of algorithms that can evaluate the emotional state of communications being exchanged—and it has already proven itself by alerting parents to cases of attempted pedophilia that could have led to disastrous outcomes, and it has alerted parents to ‘suicide pacts’ entered into among teenagers, and, of children’s undetected eating disorders.
Numerous global cellphone providers including Vodafone, Telefonica, Hutchison-Drei in Austria, Rakuten in Japan, and others throughout Europe and Asia have partnered with Keepers either as a downloadable app or as a ‘white label’ product installed on the cellphones of cell provider customers. The app complies with EU GDPR privacy laws, and the child is aware that the app is installed on his or her phone.
“Keepers won the EU’s Horizon 2020 scientific research initiative award, it came in first place in the CERPrize of the Conference of European Rabbis (link), and this past year it won the highly prestigious Israel Innovation Authority award,” according to Aviad Meshel, Keepers’ CEO. In addition, Keepers received a $2 million investment from FFG, one of Europe’s leading industrial research and development funds, and, Hutchison Water, a major stakeholder in Italian and Austrian telcos has invested $2.2 million.
Unlike some other parental monitoring apps on the market, Keepers was developed to detect and analyze numerous languages and dialects including English, Spanish, German, Italian, Arabic, Hebrew, and Japanese, and they have child psychologists on their team who assist in Keepers’ ongoing development.
Despite the lockdown and general economic downturn of the past year, Keepers experienced a 350% increase in weekly active users, and a 471% increase in growth in 2020 over 2019. “That is because of the exponential increase in cyberbullying, chat room predators, and ‘sextortion’ of girls’ images by ex-boyfriends that is now rampant in Europe, Asia, and elsewhere,” according to Lipskin, “and Keepers is by far the leading technology addressing these concerns of parents and cell providers.”
To learn more about Keepers Child Safety in the U.S. please contact Yehudah (Jeff) Brochin, at HYPERLINK “mailto:brochinlaw@gmail.com” brochinlaw@gmail.com.
