During early COVID lockdowns, a teen worked with his family to raise $1.8 million in venture funding and built a web filter with a team of data scientists and psychologists that he now hopes will help students safely surf the web.
If you're enjoying this article, you'll love our daily morning newsletter, How To LA. Every weekday, you'll get fresh, community-driven stories that catch you up with our independent local news.Like most kids, Aahil Valliani has been frustrated by the filters that his school uses to block inappropriate websites. Often, he has no idea why certain sites are blocked, especially when his web browsing is tied to his schoolwork.
Aahil, now 17, points out that schools’ overly strict controls disappear as soon as kids graduate. “That’s a recipe for disaster,” he said. Kids, he contends, need to learn how to make good choices about how to use the internet safely when trusted adults are nearby so they are ready to make good decisions on their own later.The Safe Kids filter turns web blocking into a teachable moment, explaining why sites are blocked and nudging students to stay away from them of their own accord.
Their idea, building off of the invasive and ineffective filters the brothers saw in school, essentially puts better training wheels on the internet. Aahil said his father did a bit of hand-holding in these early days, helping find board members and angel investors, as well as the data scientists who would train the AI machine learning model behind the filter and psychologists who could craft and test the filter’s hallmark pop-ups directing students toward more appropriate browsing.
“This is, really, I think, an improved option for all the things that we are generally concerned about,” Kelley said. “When kids go to a site the first time, we consider that a mistake,” Aahil said. “We tell kids why it’s not good for them and kids can make a choice.”For example, if a student tries to play games during a lesson, a pop-up would say, “This isn’t schoolwork, is it?” Students can click a “take me back” button or “tell me more” link to get more information about why a given site is blocked.
Nancy Willard, director of Embrace Civility LLC, has worked on issues of youth online safety since the mid-1990s. She submitted testimony for the congressional hearings that resulted in passage of the Children’s Internet Protection Act in 2000 and describes the filtering company representatives that showed up as snake oil salesmen, selling a technology that addresses a symptom, not the root of a problem.
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