A kid-friendly internet? This company is trying to build one
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
The insatiable data-collecting vacuum that is the modern internet was not built for kids.
So Dylan Collins is trying to build another internet, one where children can click, browse and view ads without having a single piece of personal data collected.
Collins is the chief executive of SuperAwesome , a London-based tech company that is building kid-safe products for other companies, which are required to abide by a growing list data privacy of regulations.
“You really now need an entirely separate internet that is based around allowing children to remain anonymous,” Collins said.
The idea behind SuperAwesome may seem particularly timely considering the growing backlash against tech companies and their data practices, but when Collins pitched his startup to tech investors a few years ago, he was hammered with questions about the types of data he planned to collect on young users.
The answer — none — completely bucked the trend in Silicon Valley, where every piece of personal data and user behavior was the real product driving billions of dollars in revenue for companies like Facebook and Google.
“You feel like the crazy person because you're going around and you're saying, ‘Hey, we need to build the opposite of what everyone else is talking about,’” Collins said. “The challenge for companies like Google and Facebook is that, when they built and when they architected so many of their platforms, children just simply weren't a consideration.”
Today, SuperAwesome reaches more than 500 million unique users each month through its products, which include PopJam, a platform where developers can build experiences that allow kids to like, comment and share content, and Kids Web Services, which simplifies the process of building apps.
Another product, Kid Safe Filter, a firewall for third-party advertisements, was released earlier this month and ensures every digital ad is stripped of trackers, preventing third party advertisers from storing data without first knowing whether a child is involved.
With television viewing decreasing, Collins credits the shift to digital for SuperAwesome’s growth in the past year. The company said it projected to double its revenue in 2018 and has its sights set on going public in 2020. In February, a funding round valued the company at more than $100 million .
Collins said he expects the company to continue to grow as regulations continue to evolve.
“There's a huge amount of change that's going on,” he said. “All of our technology is not only providing compliance for today, but we're ensuring that they're going to be compliant tomorrow and next year and keeping up with the latest requirements.”
MONETIZING ‘THE INTERNET OF KIDS’
The number of children online increases by 175,000 every day, according to Unicef , and advertisers are taking notice. The children’s digital advertising market is expected to be worth $1.9 billion next year, according to the PwC Kids Digital Advertising Report.
By the time a child turns 13, advertising technology companies will have collected as much as 72 million data points about them, according to SuperAwesome data.
Collins said that the company has benefitted from growing public understanding of the internet and just what it can mean for kids who are spending time online.
“I think it’s certainly not the case that Google and Facebook are going to deliberately target children, or deliberately trying to capture all of their data,” Collins said. “But it’s definitely the case that clearly a new infrastructure, what we call a ‘Zero Data Infrastructure,’ is required to support children.”
But reaching those kids comes with a set of regulatory barriers, namely COPPA, the privacy regulation in the United States and the Europe’s GDPR-K, which was enacted earlier this year. Both laws are designed to put parents in control over what information is collected about their children and, in the absence of consent, prevent sites or apps from collecting data that could identify a person.
Lindsey Barrett, a teaching fellow and staff attorney at Georgetown Law’s Communications and Technology Clinic said that the laws don’t necessarily ensure compliance.
“Far too many companies turn a blind eye to the fact that advertisers claim to be complying with COPPA when they're not,” Barrett said. “I think the objective of building safer advertising products for kids is laudable, or at least certainly better than just hoping to fly under regulators' radar.”
The SuperAwesome team has built a $100 million business around a "kids' internet." SuperAwesome
SuperAwesome now has more than 300 brand partners, including Mattel, Hasbro, Nintendo and Warner Brothers, which rely on its products to ensure they’re complying with children’s privacy laws and are collecting zero data across apps, games, platforms and advertisements. And the company is also seeing returns from the advertisements they run, despite not collecting a single data point from the children who view them.
“There needed to be some sort of company to help both sides overcome that friction,” said Hussein Kanji, founding partner at Hoxton Ventures, a London-based firm that was an early investor in SuperAwesome.
SuperAwesome does that by offering companies a dashboard where they can get an aggregate view of how advertisements perform, without any individual data from the children they engaged.
“In comparison, let’s say, if you were running a campaign targeted at adults, you would be able to go in and literally track a person, in terms of, okay they clicked on an ad, then they went to this site, then they went to this site, then they went and spent some money on Amazon,” Collins said. “Our technology ensures that nobody can capture that kind of data on children.”
TAKING ON YOUTUBE
SuperAwesome has also positioned itself as both a complement and an alternative to YouTube.
This year, the company released its own embeddable video player. It also created a SafeFam certification for YouTubers who create content geared toward children, allowing them to go through a voluntary certification process to receive a SafeFam badge they can post on their profile .
YouTube has had to put out a series of fires over the past two years, including the discovery of inappropriate content being marketed using kid-friendly keywords and concerns of inappropriate ads being matched with children’s content. Earlier this year, more than 20 advocacy groups signed a letter to the Federal Trade Commission alleging YouTube is in violation of COPPA.
“I wouldn't say we're growing based on their disadvantage, but I think certainly it is making parents much more cognizant of what is happening to children behind the scenes when they're online,” Collins said.
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Awesome idea!(pun intended) I'm going to look into getting this for my 8 year old granddaughter.
What a great idea this is. AWESOME.
I don't get it. Is it some subscription service that one signs up to?
How would they know who is a kid and who is not?
It almost just sounds like using a certain web browser or isp that limits content.
Does it matter?
Maybe. It almost sounds like corralling the kids all onto one platform, then target them with specific adds.
Yes, so if an adult does use this platform their data will not be collected either. Seems they are just assuring that anyone who uses the "kid-friendly" internet will not have data collected on the user. The goal is to have safe content for children and no data collected.
It is still just a nanny system that blocks content.
I tend to think that the company still keeps all of its records and history. The company works with advertisers to decide what adds are shown. The company itself would have to be keeping tabs on data to see what adds are successful and pass on information to the advertisers.
Bingo. The idea is not new, neither are any of the applications that are described in the article. Net Nanny has been doing this for over a decade. The problem is that you are putting what your kids can see in the hands of somebody else. You will also run into the same problem all the other similar products run into, kids are smart, kids have friends that are smart, it won't take them long to find out how to bypass everything and get back out to the uncensored internet.
This is not a different internet, it is the same internet with filter software installed between you and the objectionable websites. Trouble is that it will be built so the parent can access the censored material.
Company I work for, several years ago, installed internet access to a new hospital. They built firewalls and proxy servers with the singular intent of filtering out the questionable material from patients. Since lawyers rule the world, they did not want to be in any position of liability because of patient access to those certain websites. After spending well over a million dollars, they did a tour with the rest of us in the tech department to show how locked down they were. They took us to an empty room, gave us the wireless keyboard and told us to have at it.
The 1st tech showed them that the filter was so tight that patients couldn't even access some websites to gain medical knowledge of their condition. Not all medical conditions of course, but some fairly big ones including childbirth.
I was the 2nd one to play, and it took me all of 30 seconds to bring up porn pictures, video, and the websites that the 1st tech showed as blocked.
The rest of the techs showed different methods of getting to the websites despite all the filters. None of the methods we used required any special knowledge of the filter's inner workings, or any special network access that we had as techs.
My whole point is that what SuperAwesome is building may sound super and awesome, but it will be a very temporary fix, and hopefully you won't be stuck in a year long contract after your child learns to bypass it within the 1st week. The only way to truly block everything you want is to build your own internet, with your own cabling and servers, and your own web browsers and search engines. Like China or North Korea, but there are even ways around those if you are smart enough.
That is what I thought. Just a nanny system with its own website.
As kids these days use the internet for school work and research, I see it limiting them on what they can or could do.
But as you said, the smarter ones could find a way around it.
Or even if they are not so smart, they have smarter friends or even non-filtered web pages that will tell you how to bypass the filter.
We had kiosks set up, at one point, at our surgery locations to allowed patients and relatives to research the condition and even print out any questions to ask the surgeon. These thin clients were as locked down as they could be. One day I was checking them out, refilling the printer paper for the visitors, and found over 50 printed pages in the printer on how to bypass restrictions on the exact model of thin client we were using.
This a great idea. Wish I thought of it. Hope they can filter out all the adult content too.
Fantastic story of a successful venture and a reminder that we live in a time of tremendous economic opportunities.
This won't work. It will have the same vulnerabilities as the current internet as it will use the same networking protocols as the current internet. What everyone is calling a new internet is really nothing more than licensing agreements and Service-Level Agreements between companies. Essentially, this product only creates a false sense of security.
while also encouraging a Nanny State as well -- "Don't worry, we know what's best for you and will make sure you don't do anything that might hurt you or get you upset, we know all of this better than you do so don't worry about making decisions or anything - we'll take care of it all for you ! (in the name of security and protection of course)"