AI online grooming alert protects students

An AI-powered online grooming alert has been designed to protect children from tactics used by online predators.

This new function is available in Saasyan’s cloud-based, online student safety solution, Saasyan Assure, and leverages a combination of natural language processing AI and other advanced analytics to detect early signs of online grooming within a student’s chat, email and online drives.

“With the increase of technologies used in schools and the variety of online platforms available, predators have been given more opportunity to reach children. This new capability aims to help quickly identify instances of online grooming, enabling schools to act before a child is sexually exploited,” said Sidney Minassian, CEO of Saasyan.

The alert function detects potentially harmful common tactics used by abusers, such as:

• identifying when communication is between adults and children;
• the use of sexualised language in a student’s chat, email or online drive;
• pressuring a child to send photos or meet in person;
• a child sending or receiving sexually explicit material;
• a child searching something sexual they have been asked for by their abuser; and
• requesting a child to keep secrets from their parents.
   

Saasyan also recently announced Safe Image AI, which detects any images containing sexual content in a student’s online drive. It is designed to help prevent image-based abuse, more commonly referred to as revenge porn.

By detecting and alerting schools of possible instances of online grooming and image-based abuse, Saasyan enables teachers, counsellors and IT professionals to intervene proactively.

Image credit: ©stock.adobe.com/au/Sander van der Werf