Keeping Kids Safe Online: The Safe Surfer Story

Transcript is computer-generated and may contain errors.

Paul Spain:
Hey folks, greetings and welcome along to the New Zealand Tech Podcast. I’m your host, Paul Spain. Today we’re joined by Rory Birkbeck, co-founder and chief executive of Safe Surfer. Rory’s startup journey began with a challenging question: how to make the internet safer without compromising privacy, freedom, or the user experience? That vision led to the creation of Safe Surfer, a New Zealand software-as-a-service platform to help families, schools, and organisations stay safer online. So today we’ll dive into the startup journey of Safe Surfer, the challenges of solving hard problems through technology, and where the future of online safety is headed. Well, let’s jump in.

Paul Spain:
Welcome along to the show. How are you, Rory?

Rory Birkbeck:
Hey, good, Paul. Thanks for having me.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, well, it’s, it’s pleasing to have you here in the studio.

Rory Birkbeck:
Thanks for making the trip to visit us from the lovely Tauranga, Yeah, it’s always nice to visit this part of the country.

Paul Spain:
Excellent. Well, keen to delve into your story shortly, but first up, a big thank you to our show partners, Spark New Zealand, One NZ, 2degrees, Workday, Fortinet, PwC, and Gorilla Technology. Well, let’s dive in. Really, you know, I think it’s great to be able to set aside some time to talk about, you know, how we do get the best out of technology in a safe way, really.

Rory Birkbeck:
Yeah, absolutely. You know, I think technology is awesome. Like, I think both of us would agree, you know, just how cool innovation and technology is. And even seeing it through my own kids and my own son, he just got a 3D printer recently, you know, and it’s just so cool seeing the stuff that he can come up with. But yeah, for Safe Surfer, you know, I guess what I’ve been focused on the last 10 years Our mission is to protect the mental health of young people through technology, education, and advocacy. There was a lot of harm starting to happen to young people about 10 years ago through social media, through all of these different things. And so we’ve sort of been on this mission building out really cool innovative technology for families to be able to protect their kids. And that’s been a huge journey to actually figure out You know, and so a lot of the journey has actually been how do we create a platform for online safety that’s really simple for parents to be able to use in a really effective way to be able to proactively protect their young people.

Paul Spain:
Do you still describe it as a startup? How do you describe it to those in the tech and the business world?

Rory Birkbeck:
Yeah, I think it’s moved to the scale-up phase. So I think at some point, you know, we’re in 120 countries. Now the technology is used kind of all over the world. And so I think at some point you tip over from being a startup into a scale-up.

Paul Spain:
Safe Surfer sounds like a great idea. Can you break down for us, you’ve got, you know, 3 key things that you do. Can you give us sort of a summary of what that is?

Rory Birkbeck:
Yeah, for sure. So there’s a, I guess there’s a software platform for parents to be able to control and monitor everything. But the 3 things that we do is a home router. And so that sets up a separate Wi-Fi hotspot that the kids’ devices can be connected to. And then they can be varying different controls on those. There’s software that we’ve developed for pretty much every platform now that can be put onto, you name the device, you know, and in that way it can do nudity detection, social media monitoring, screen time, and internet filtering. And then we’ve got the special partnership with Samsung to release a kid-safe smartphone and tablets. And so that means that it’s basically a phone out of the box without an internet browser, without an app store.

Rory Birkbeck:
And then really it’s about unlocking different things as parents kind of need. So they can have, you know, like an app that kids might need, like the TeenReach app or something like that. But everything else is very much locked away or not even on the phone or the device. So that’s what Safe Surfer offers.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. Where did the genesis of the Safe Surfer idea come from? How did that come about?

Rory Birkbeck:
Yeah, so roughly about 10 years ago, I had a friend and his family was sort of struggling with online safety. And so I’d had a background at about 20 years in tech. And so I started to delve into it. And what I soon realised was just the scale of the harm that was taking place to young people and also the complexity of the problem. And so for me then it was, how do I rally a community? You know, and that’s kind of where it started, was rallying a community to be able to build technology to solve this problem and bootstrapping obviously as well along the way.

Paul Spain:
Can you tell us a little bit about, you know, getting started, what that looked like and, you know, how you got funded initially, and, um, you know, we can walk just a little bit through that sort of, you know, background story.

Rory Birkbeck:
Yeah, so Safe Surfer is actually a social enterprise, so it’s been a really interesting, um, I guess, impact investment story. Um, and so seeing the problem, you know, I, I saw, wow, this is actually the technology that’s going to be required to solve this problem, which is actually going to need some money. And so what we did was we went out and raised some money Which is extremely hard to do. And so being able to actually raise some money and then build, I guess for me, which was a really ideal solution in going through the R&D phase, tapping into the likes of Callaghan Innovation and things like that, to be able to build kind of what was then the base layer, which was the internet filter part of it. And so I guess just kind of grappling with how do you build a world-class filter? And what are all the parts that are required to do that? And so as part of that, I guess what we’ve realised is that also there’s a number of other safety layers that needed to be added on top. And now we’re sort of into the space of actually developing child-safe operating systems. So recently we did this partnership with Samsung to do a kid-safe smartphone. And so now it’s actually about how do we take things from the operating system and apply safety at a number of different layers through that.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, great. Now, I’m always interested in the, you know, in that startup journey. You mentioned, you know, 120 countries, partnership with Samsung. I see, you know, likes of Tyndall Foundation have supported you, Callaghan. What were the things that really helped you get traction? Where did you see that kind of point where things really did start to scale? Because you can pour years and years into R&D and so on, but ultimately, if you want to have an impact, if you want to generate an income, you need to reach that scale.

Rory Birkbeck:
Yeah, absolutely. Look, I think investment certainly helps. just after COVID, I guess, we, we did our first investment round. And from then on, we were really on a different kind of trajectory. And so I—

Paul Spain:
share with us what you raised at that point?

Rory Birkbeck:
Yeah, look, it was just a couple of hundred grand, the initial seed round. But what that did was that it actually enabled us to start to build the SaaS platform, start to build kind of the billing engine and start to become sustainable. as a business. And so, you know, and that’s actually a really important part of it, even though we’re very much impact-focused. Still, actually, how do you become sustainable? How do you reach those critical numbers? For any SaaS startup, it’s really important, you know. And so things like recurring revenue, you know, and subscriptions are really our lifeline of our company, you know. And so I think it’s really cool when you can get to that point, and you can go, actually, wow, we’ve reached sustainability. And that took us a couple of funding rounds, you know, but we did it from more of an impact focus, as I say.

Rory Birkbeck:
So we weren’t profit-focused first, we weren’t looking for a quick exit or anything like that. We were much focused about how do we build a really long-term strategic asset that is going to help New Zealand and help New Zealanders.

Paul Spain:
Right, so that would’ve actually, narrowed your sort of pool of potential investors down to those who were more open to investing in the mission and not necessarily looking for how they can, you know, 10x or 100x their investment, I’m picking.

Rory Birkbeck:
Yeah, and I think that’s really good, you know, when you actually get down to the investors that you actually want, because then you, you do get those investors, you know, rather than trying to go out to everybody and say, you know, hey, give us some money. When you find the people that are really passionate about what you’re passionate about, you know, and they’re really invested and they also really care about people, you know, and this is where the likes of the Tyndall Foundation, Whakatapu Aotearoa Foundation, you know, and even some private investors in Tauranga through Radford Software, we really pulled together a great team great governance, and then also to be able to build our own internal team of excellence, which is about how do you go overseas, how do you learn through the R&D that’s taking place, bring it back into your company, and then start to embed it. So it’s kind of a perpetual cycle that then you don’t need to keep going offshore and looking for that that skill or whatever it is. And so I think there’s huge upside when you get all of those factors right. And there’s a lot of hard work, to be honest, a heck of a lot of hard work. And so yeah, we have been really fortunate with the people that we’ve partnered with.

Paul Spain:
Great. And I think there’s always learning to come through the tough times. Any sort of particular low point you can look back on where you thought, this is it, I’m having to pull the plug, this isn’t going to play out, or anything else that really sort of stands in your mind as quite pivotal?

Rory Birkbeck:
Oh, look, there’s been a huge number of challenges, you know, and I think the ability for startups to face adversity is really huge. Like, I remember someone talking about it like trying to scale Mount Everest, you know, in comparison to I guess, going up against competitors and things like that. And I think that really does kind of sum it up, you know, is that it is a huge climb and every day you just, you just get closer and closer to climbing it. So, you know, there’s, there’s always a number of challenges. Yes, there’s been some, some really low points, particularly just before COVID for us, just before we raised that initial investment. It was a really, really hard period.

Paul Spain:
And were you sort of bootstrapping? You were self-funding things yourselves?

Rory Birkbeck:
Yeah, absolutely.

Paul Spain:
At that stage? So was that a point where you did think that maybe this isn’t actually gonna play out?

Rory Birkbeck:
I totally thought that. You know, you’ve got your mortgage on the line, you’ve got your family, all those types of things. And so when investors come in and they actually see the potential they see what you’re trying to do and they give you that lift up, you know, it is honestly transforming for a company.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, well, fantastic on what you’ve achieved so far. I’m keen to delve into, you know, more of the details. So maybe you can just, you know, summarise for us, you know, really the problem that you are, you know, that here to solve with Safe Surfer?

Rory Birkbeck:
Yeah, like as I mentioned, you know, online harm is such a traverse thing. Like it is on every platform and there’s so many, you know, you take from social media to AI now to all of these different things that kids are involved in and it’s such a complex problem. And that’s what I’ve had to grapple with, is just how complex the actual problem itself is, and then how simple you have to make the solution when it comes to parents. So there’s always been kind of enterprise solutions that tech-savvy people can kind of tap into. But what we’ve needed to do is we’ve needed to take all of these really complex solutions and bring them to families. And that’s really been where we started. You know, we started by helping a couple of families. And we saw the huge impact that it had.

Rory Birkbeck:
And then we thought, how can we scale this? And so it is really just such a hard— when you see the harm and the harm that’s actually happening to young people, it gets you up every day.

Paul Spain:
So, Kev, before we sort of delve into how you solved that, what can you share for those? And I think, Yeah, most of us are often, you know, reasonably naive to the harms if we don’t, you know, see them ourselves. And yeah, we will see some bits and pieces come through in the media around online harm, but you’ve probably got some specifics you can share with us that maybe help sort of, you know, personalize the realities a little bit more. Yeah.

Rory Birkbeck:
Yeah, I think, you know, some of the research that I’ve done recently in the last couple of years, you know, when you see that 1/3 of young people are having a sexual interaction, you know, with someone they don’t know online, it shows you that there’s something clearly wrong. And so, you know, there’s kind of the grooming problem, there’s the bullying problem. You know, there’s so many of these problems which haven’t been solved by these platforms. And so there’s kind of the 4 C’s. There’s a content problem. So the way the algorithm is targeting them, you know, particularly in their vulnerabilities, you know, what they might be thinking at a particular time and serving them more and more content like that. There’s contact, as I mentioned. So just the way that they’ve been able to get contact with individuals and and kind of predators, I guess, in that regard.

Rory Birkbeck:
And then there’s conduct. So the way the platforms have kind of lured them into the way that young people conduct themselves. So you think about like deepfakes and things like that, you know, like the way that they can easily get access to using deepfake technology, and they’re even sort of implicated in some of these platforms to use it for, in some cases, illegal purposes. And then the other problem is contract. And so that’s the contractual obligations that young people come into when they are entering into these platforms. So when they tick the box, you know, and they haven’t read all the terms and conditions, because none of us do, you know, apparently it’s like reading Moby Dick, the equivalent of Moby Dick, you know, the kind of the terms and conditions that we go through. And it’s not in childlike terms.

Paul Spain:
Yeah.

Rory Birkbeck:
You know, there’s so many harms, I guess, that are happening to young people through those 4 different avenues. And so really it’s how do we get on top of all 4 of those things? And then obviously the amplification of AI in all of that as well.

Paul Spain:
Yep. Now, so in practice, what are you able to deliver that helps protect families, schools, anyone that uses, you know, your technology? And how does that, I guess, compare with other approaches? Because every device will have some sort of parental control type capability generally these days, whether it’s Android, iOS, Windows, Mac, even YouTube. There’s lots and lots of different things, which is part of what brings the complexity, right?

Rory Birkbeck:
Yeah. So we’ve always been about how do we teach families to swim between the flags? when they’re online. And so really it’s about—

Paul Spain:
I love that.

Rory Birkbeck:
It’s a great idea. Yeah, how do you block out all of the other stuff? So our categorizer now has like 100+ categories in it. And so parents can easily go in and turn off and on just the things that they need and they want for their family. And so that’s a huge part of the problem solved is just making sure that parents— kids can only get access to the platforms that they need. And parents haven’t necessarily gotta worry about the other platforms.

Paul Spain:
How important is that nuance, that uniqueness where one family wants something a little bit different, or maybe they want something different for different youngsters in their family? Is that quite a common thing? ‘Cause we obviously have the pushes towards, say, ban social media for under 16, for instance. And, you know, I think there’s certainly been, you know, some strong arguments sort of for, some strong arguments against. But when it comes down to the realities, do you find that there is, you know, quite a need for some granularity here?

Rory Birkbeck:
I absolutely do. I think the myriad of platforms that young people are on, it far extends kind of the 10 social media platforms that were targeted with the ban, you know. So I think that there is just so many avenues and opportunities And so the more that you can cut back on those, and you can kind of bring it into just kind of a mainstream couple of platforms, you know, that parents can then actually stay on top of. The power of Safe Surfer as well is also in the monitoring. So it’s actually been proactive in the harm. It’s watching the screen, it’s picking up any bullying, grooming, you know, all of that kind of content using really smart technology. and then being able to surface those back as alerts. So yeah, so those are 2 kind of real keys, I guess.

Rory Birkbeck:
And then, you know, the screen time as well, like figuring out, okay, how many times is a young person hitting this certain platform, which kind of is a signal, yeah, that they might actually be addicted to it. So it’s not necessarily about the amount of screen time that they’re using, but it’s actually about how many repeated attempts are they going back and trying to access a particular app. So, you know, there’s sort of, I guess, a couple of those things kind of coming together.

Paul Spain:
Any other statistics or findings that maybe most individuals, families wouldn’t be aware of? Any other things that could just help people understand the problems more broadly?

Rory Birkbeck:
Yeah, look, I don’t think we have a huge amount of good research in New Zealand. So a lot of the research that we rely on is, you know, in the US and the UK. And some of that research is helpful. One of the concerning ones for me as well was just around porn. Just seeing that, you know, by the time a young person is 13, most young people would have seen porn in some way or shape or form. And so that shows us the kind of education that we need to be doing, you know, and just how parents really need to be educating quite early. need to be having those conversations early and often, you know, and using technology as well to be part of that solution.

Paul Spain:
You know, I heard something saying that the norm of, you know, porn in say 2026 compared to what it was when many of us were growing up to a, you know, completely different level where in an online kind of context, the extremeness of the content is night and day different to what, you know, a lot of listeners might’ve encountered as, you know, teenagers or what have you in past decades.

Rory Birkbeck:
Yeah, you know, I think that there’s really a difference in understanding of where porn is now and what we would kind of consider as mainstream porn, particularly around consent, you know, around violence that’s shown. Even things like choking and things like that, which have kind of become normalized with young people. So it has traveled a long, long way from, you know, the magazine 10, 20 years ago, you know, whatever it is, to what it is now. And so therefore, a child seeing something like that can be very hard, you know, at a young age and very impactful on them. And so we really do need to protect against that. And so them being able to just easily access it has always been a struggle for me. You know, it’s like, how can we put more barriers in place to make sure that that doesn’t happen?

Paul Spain:
And how do you, how do you do that with your technology? You know, you talked about, you know, filtering and operating systems. So, you know, what are, what are those options look like? Today, you know, I look at the sort of mechanisms a lot of families will turn on through, you know, it might be something on their router, it might be something at an operating system type of level, but it can quite quickly get quite complex. So what are you able to do and how do you keep that reasonably easy?

Rory Birkbeck:
Yeah, look, I think the first thing is that actually to build a really robust filter is actually really hard. And it’s hard to actually know what a robust filter looks like because you can’t see it from the outside. You don’t know using one product or another product how good they are comparatively. And so, you know, in the case of porn, for example, we’ve classified a couple of million porn sites, you know, and that’s a huge number. And we do that kind of proactively.

Paul Spain:
That’s an insane number.

Rory Birkbeck:
It’s an absolutely insane number, you know. And so Just that one metric alone is really important. And as you say, you know, there’s lots of other tools that kind of have a badge. But until we have safety standards, until we have transparency, you’ll find out that a lot of these tools actually aren’t as good as what they say they are. And so that’s, I guess, that’s always been one of the concerns for me is just going, Well, you know, like actually there’s all of these loopholes, or there’s all of these things that aren’t covered. And so I think that we, we need to move to more of like what we do, where we can block out huge amounts of domains, you know, if they’re Russian domains or whatever it is. And we can really tailor kind of the experience for people within a filter. And so a filter is a really powerful thing.

Rory Birkbeck:
when you consider it the same way we use water and we filter our water, either it can filter a little bit or it can filter a lot and we can get a lot of the impurities out. And so I think that having a really robust filter is really important. And there’s only really a handful, I would say, of what I would consider really robust filters in the world. So that’s the first part of it. And then the other part of it, as I mentioned, with the child-safe operating systems, is how do you add all of those other safety layers? So, you know, so that there is kind of an immediate alert that happens if there’s a Google search, for example, or something else or some other kind of thing that shows up on the screen, even nudity detection, we’ve got that built into the screen now. So it will actually send an alert to parents if there’s any form of nudity that’s detected. And so those are technologies that have taken us a long time to build. And when it comes to the Google Family Link or Apple Screen Time, whatever it is, they’re really just at a compliance level.

Paul Spain:
You see, like, they’re doing it to tick a box, to look like they’re being safe. But when you look into the realities of it, it’s not like it’s actually being run as a core purpose within that organisation that, that, you know, they really, really care about the full outcomes. It’s— it is leaning much more to, to look good from, from an outside perspective. I mean, I’ve heard that before from other people that aren’t, you know, trying to sell a competing offering.

Rory Birkbeck:
Yeah, exactly.

Paul Spain:
But that, that’s very much what you’re seeing?

Rory Birkbeck:
Yeah, that, that is absolutely the reality of it, you know. And so that’s very hard for parents. Because they’ll think, oh, this thing will work. And then all of a sudden, you know, there’s a number of different loopholes within it or whatever it is. Yeah.

Paul Spain:
One I’ve found, and you probably can mention others, but for instance, within our environment, we have, you know, we have a family-managed iPhone. And in that case, then, you know, with the varying tools and filtering, you can control what’s accessible through, uh, through the iPhone.

Rory Birkbeck:
Mm.

Paul Spain:
But what you can’t do anywhere is turn off— there’s no way to turn off the tethering. And so one youngster can go through another youngster’s, you know, connection or another device. You might have everything all nicely filtered, but then you can’t turn off the tethering on a youngster’s iPhone. The personal hotspot. So the personal hotspot. And so, you know, then you, you create, you know, you kind of create a loophole. Any other device that can then connect through that then just bypasses all of the, all of the mechanisms, you know, potentially, right? So there’s these sorts of, sorts of things that back up what you’re saying. Yeah, I don’t know what other things you’ve seen, but it’s like, well, why can’t, why can’t you to try all these other things, but you’ve got no way to, you know, to do that on that connection.

Rory Birkbeck:
Yeah, the partnership that we have with Samsung, you know, is really to develop this kind of child-safe smartphone, you know. And so it’s how do you lock all of those functions, you know, like the tethering, so they can’t set up a personal hotspot, you know, they can’t sideload apps, they can’t— literally, there’s sort of 100 kind of security policies that you’ve got to put in place. And then not allow the App Store, not allow an internet browser. You know, those things are literally not on the device. And so it’s kind of an ideal way that we can teach families to step up, you know, so they can go from an Essentials profile to an Explorer profile to an Empower profile. And each of those, you’re kind of giving over a little bit more and more control. And that’s what parents need to do, you know, is that they need to start really early. And they need to just gradually give over control.

Rory Birkbeck:
You know, it’s not about giving over all the control straight away. And we see that a lot with parents, you know, like even things like router passwords. You know, you’d be surprised how many parents don’t even know the back of a router, for example, and they’ve given away the router password and things like that. So, you know, there’s, um, yeah, there’s sort of a number of things. And then also like watching our own tech use as well, you know, the way that we are role modeling the way that we use tech in front of our kids.

Paul Spain:
You talk about parents are perfect in every sense. We always set the perfect example.

Rory Birkbeck:
Yeah, exactly. No, not you?

Paul Spain:
No, no, not me either. Okay, now, how— it’s sort of stepping back from the technology, you know, how do we raise, you know, a generation of people who are resilient digitally and that can, you know, are gonna be able to cope? Because obviously you can put some guardrails in at some point, but yeah, the guardrails have to come off. And of course they’re imperfect at best in most situations.

Rory Birkbeck:
Yeah, look, I think that we need to do a lot more with education. Like, in the amount of online safety education that we’re doing at the moment, is really a pebble compared to the size of the problem. And so it’s about how do we educate kids really early on, even before they have devices, about how they can actually use the devices effectively, what are the different things that they’re gonna encounter as they come across it, things like digital footprints and things like that, that we can talk about really early. And we actually developed a book for really young kids called Keeping Safe on the Web with Kyle the Kingfish. And it talks kids through that whole online journey from a very early age. You know, I’ve done it with my kids and it’s really cool.

Paul Spain:
That’s something we’ll link to in the notes that’s available for sale. So yeah, I mean, these are the sort of resources I think that help fill in the gaps, right?

Rory Birkbeck:
Yeah, they do. They do, you know. And then as kids get older, there’s other resources that we can tap into as well. You know, there’s things like The Amazing Generation, which has just been brought out by John Hyatt and Catherine Price. And so it’s for hitting those kind of older, older kids. But I think for me as well, it’s about how do we use the technology and the education and bring those together, because the messages need to be really robust conversations with our young people and more often than what you’d think. You know, so I remember one online safety educator saying, We need to talk to young people about porn 10 times at least before they hit the age of 10. And that’s kind of a good marker, you know, so that we are actually having those conversations.

Rory Birkbeck:
And now with AI, you know, I think there’s a whole raft of conversations that we need to start having, and even well before the kids start to start getting on and using prompts and different things.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. Good guidance online as well as, you know, books and so on. Is that a resource that’s part of what Safe Surfer deliver as well?

Rory Birkbeck:
We do a couple of resources. You know, our focus has largely been in the tech space. So there are a number of good resources. Obviously here in New Zealand, there’s NetSafe, which has some good resources. And then there’s eSafety Commissioner over in Australia. They’ve got some good resources as well. And then there’s, there’s other sort of players in the US which have done a lot of really good resources.

Paul Spain:
Now, how do you see AI having, you know, changed the game and, you know, I guess continuing to, to change things in the years ahead?

Rory Birkbeck:
Yeah, it was interesting when I was doing sort of research about 2 years ago into generative AI. And everyone was starting to talk about the problems with social media, I sort of noticed that all of the, the big tech companies had kind of shifted their business models to more AI-focused business models. And so the— I sort of see it as more of like a Social Media 2.0, you know, in the way that they have shifted from engagement to now affection. So they’re actually trying to create affection with our young people through AI chatbots and things like that. And this started with platforms like Character AI, where young people could set up a persona and they could start to have a conversation. And these platforms, there were huge numbers of young people even 2 years ago on these platforms. So, you know, when I looked at it, it was about 10 million young people just on this one particular platform. And now what we know is that all of that has been embedded into every single AI platform.

Rory Birkbeck:
So most young people now would be using some form of generative AI, or the stats from Common Sense Media say it’s about 70 to 80% in the US of young people using ChatGPT and things like that for their homework or sort of parts of it. And then about half of those are actually, I guess, perhaps in a regular pattern of using it. And then obviously there’s some of those that are actually in quite an unhealthy pattern because of the way that it’s not trying to just take over like your Google search as a competitor, it’s actually trying to take out your closest intimate friendships and relationships with parents. And so some of the use cases for it are things like personal therapy and things like that. And so they’ve really tried to go to a whole nother level with this technology to engage our deepest and our most intimate thoughts and opinions and try to become almost like a friend.

Paul Spain:
I mean, yeah, friends are good. So what do you see as the downsides? Because obviously, you know, the technology in terms of generative AI can encourage people to do good things, make good decisions, engage well with others and so on. But there is a flip side to that. What are the things that you’re aware of on that front?

Rory Birkbeck:
I think for me, generative AI and the way that we have exposed it to young people has largely been a mass experiment. You know, and so it’s kind of like all technology, you know, we get excited about this cool thing we’ve built and then we roll it out to everyone. And so I think that there was 2 paths that we can really go down with AI. The first path is trying to build technology, you know, kind of like The Jetsons, if you like, you know. So we’re actually— it’s like this rosy world and we do everything well and we do everything right. And then the other side of it is the path that we’ve kind of gone down, which is we don’t consider any safety rails, you know, we don’t consider transparency of the models, you know. And so a lot of those things are the parts that concern me. And so what actually happened is there’s only really recently research that’s come out about generative AI.

Rory Birkbeck:
And if you take the personal therapy, for example, what they found is that AI models are not very good when it comes to a crisis. So it is very hard at detecting a crisis. And so because the models are all about affirmation and trying to continually lure you back into this friendship, it won’t break out to a human in the loop, which is really what it needs to do. It needs to go, actually, I’m not sure what’s going on here. you need to get help from someone. And so that research has really come out just recently.

Paul Spain:
Right. So that’s where we’re sort of seeing scenarios of AIs encouraging self-harm to, you know, in some cases the most extreme level, encouraging youngsters to basically rebel against whatever sort of parental direction or advice. You know, taking them into all sorts of loops that encourage thinking that is really, really unhealthy from a mental health, you know, wellbeing perspective.

Rory Birkbeck:
Yeah. You know, I think AI is really about what it’s been trained on. And so it’s about those training sets. And so what they found with the crisis model is that that crisis function has to actually be built into the safety aspect of it. So there’s a technique called safety by design, which is really how do we best design our platforms with safety in mind before the feature gets built or before the platform gets built. And so, you know, if you take safety by design and you look at, okay, well, what were the challenges going to be before we roll this out to young people, you’d very quickly start to discover some of those things and then you’d start to really build in safety in the heart of it. And that’s what hasn’t happened. So now we’re trying to scramble again to how can we fix this problem and it’s already gone out there.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. AI can be part of the solution too, right? It’s not always the problem in these scenarios. What are the positives that you see?

Rory Birkbeck:
Yeah, so absolutely. Even with what we do, we use AI proactively. AI has a really important part to play in solving, you know, children and online safety. And some of the AI models that we use now are really, really effective. So there is a huge part of how do we, how do we take AI and we use it for good without all of the kind of the harms attached. And I think for me, it comes down to the business model of the companies behind it, you know, because it’s really— When you create technology, it’s about who actually created that technology and what was their intent when they created it. And so, you know, because the creation is embedded in the technology. And so if you look at it from that lens, and again we go back to privacy, safety, and security, you’ve got all of those 3 things right, you know, and you’ve got the impact of users as the paramount, the most important thing, then it flips the model on its head.

Rory Birkbeck:
So it’s not about technology being the problem. It’s about the business models being the problem.

Paul Spain:
Right, right. And, you know, just hearing you talk about, yeah, you being able to use AI as part of your technology, I guess there’s a level to which folks will get concerned knowing that there’s maybe AI kind of watching in the background. But I think there’s a what you’re talking to there in terms of who’s behind it. So the idea that a global tech giant is monitoring everything going on on your youngster’s phone and that there’s a kind of a mass surveillance at that level versus maybe an entity that is there, you know, and the whole purpose is to protect youngsters.

Rory Birkbeck:
Mm-hmm.

Paul Spain:
They might— the software might be able to do some similar things, But if the intent is coming from the right place, I think folks are likely to be much more comfortable with that rather than going, oh, yep, the tech giants kind of monitoring these things and not necessarily with all of the right intentions. Or certainly it’s easy for things to look that way from, you know, plenty of examples we’ve seen in the past from the tech giants.

Rory Birkbeck:
I think that there’s a lot of best practice that we can put in place. So, you know, the right to be forgotten in terms of privacy, I think, is so important. So we delete all information after 90 days, you know, and that’s really the lifespan of when the information might be useful to someone. So I think that, you know, things like that and things like on-device processing— so we don’t send everything off to the cloud, you know, we’re only sending off things which are a particular alert or whatever might be the case. And then having those road markers. And you can— so when you can actually read someone’s terms and conditions and you can actually go, okay, I know exactly what’s going on with the information, you know, that for me is when I use products, I feel a certain amount of comfort, I guess. And what I have seen is that has not been the case, you know. And so we need to be a lot stricter on privacy in terms of the way these big platforms have been allowed to take our information, use it, and the way that we’ve actually just given it over freely in a lot of cases.

Paul Spain:
You know, that 90 days, that makes a lot of sense. Do you give families maybe a bit more granular control than they would get elsewhere on these sorts of things, as well as a good level of transparency? How have you approached that?

Rory Birkbeck:
Through our platform, People can actually see all of the things that are happening through their internet connection, or the device that their kids are on, and then all of the different alerts. And even within that, we have different privacy settings. So you can actually go on and you can have things like no logging, but you can have filtering, you know? So it means that all of a sudden you’ve got kind of a middle ground of what you’re comfortable with.

Paul Spain:
Right.

Rory Birkbeck:
And I think we need to start seeing more things like that. I also think that in terms of the privacy space, we need to start seeing things more like data sovereignty. So where is our data actually being stored and having different options about where we store our data? So I think things like that are really going to help. That’s something we’re looking at at the moment. And I’m surprised that a lot of other companies aren’t looking at different options for user privacy, user data around that.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah, that sounds really important. In New Zealand, we’ve talked about A number of things. One is banning social media, you know, the most well-known social media platforms potentially for those that are under 16. Most recently tabled a suggestion of limiting those under 16 to non-smartphones. Do you think that these are the right sort of approaches to keep youngsters safe?

Rory Birkbeck:
I think that we definitely need an independent regulator in New Zealand. So we’ve got a number of government departments at the moment, and they can kind of just pass the buck between each other. So we need a single front door, we need an Online Safety Act, and we need an online safety agency. And so this is something that Australia started about 10 years ago, and they started to bring in sort of online codes. So for different industries, just around sort of the more objectionable material. And so I think things like that are really important. For me, I think the social media delay, if you like, is really important for parents to be able to say, hey, you can’t go on social media until you’re 16. But there’s actually a really big part of it in terms of the solution, which is quite hard to do.

Rory Birkbeck:
You know, and so it’s a privacy question in disguise. And that’s the part that I guess I’m really concerned about. Even, you know, in Australia, it’s just 10 platforms. But really, there’s a whole landscape of platforms that young people are on. And so it means that there’s almost like this slippery slope, if you like, to being able to ID young people And yes, it might just be face scans at the moment, but in Australia, that hasn’t really worked. And so they’re gonna start stepping that up and stepping that up. And so I think there’s an obligation on the platforms to do better at trying to solve the problem of younger people being on their platforms. But I don’t think that us trying to go after young people to try and enforce them and try and stop all the workarounds, you know, I think that’s going to lead to big problems.

Rory Birkbeck:
So I really like the idea of the more of this going after the hardware, you know, the going after the technology, because I think we could spend a huge amount of money going after the tech platforms themselves. And they’re vast, you know. So, but actually controlling the technology that comes into our country and is sold to young people I think that we can put safety standards in place. We can put transparency in place the same way we have things like warrant of fitnesses and things like that, where it’s clearly tagged, clearly marked, hey, this is the type of technology this is. It’s been road-tested. And this is going to become more and more important as we start to see humanoids start to come on the line, as we start to see things like AI pins. The technology is going to get smaller. AI glasses, all these types of things.

Rory Birkbeck:
AI toys for kids. I think that actually regulating the manufacturers, and it would be a lot easier to do that than to try and go after the software, which is in international jurisdictions. And people talk about safety by design, but actually when it comes to those platforms, that is extremely hard to do, trying to convince a trillion-dollar company to do something. And so yes, We can kind of pull together as all of our countries and try and go after them. But I don’t think that that’s going to be very easy, and I think it’s going to cost a lot of money. And so therefore, actually going after the software is a much better idea.

Paul Spain:
Right. So don’t so much regulate the Metas and the social media companies, but look at the actual devices and the software that sits on top of them. And so what’s been the approach that Safe Surfer has taken with your partnership with Samsung? What have you delivered? What’s available today for someone that’s thinking, well, you know, give me an easy option, Rory. So what does that actually look like?

Rory Birkbeck:
Yeah, so it’s basically a smart dumb phone, you know, out of the box. So it comes with our internet browser, it comes with our app store, and it’s really sandboxed. And so it sort of falls into that dumb phone category, except it’s more of a cooler phone. So, you know, it sort of solves the problem with the big buttons, you know, for the dumb phone and things like that. So I think it really has hit into that category of what parents need.

Paul Spain:
And then do you have options to be able to turn more capabilities on? How have you approached that?

Rory Birkbeck:
Yeah, so there’s kind of the 3 different stages. There’s the essential stage, which is, as I mentioned, just for kind of essential apps, and then you can open it up further, you know, and start to allow, you know, things as parents kind of need. And so the tamper-proof mode is really at the essential stage. And so I think, you know, that is a real role model for what the technology could look like and how we could roll this out to young people.

Paul Spain:
Right. And so thinking of a, you know, future type of solution. So, I mean, let’s say as a country we sort of mandated that every smartphone or every phone that was sold, you can basically designate that for someone that’s whatever, 16+, 18+, wherever those lines are drawn, 12+, who knows. But some way of kind of being able to differentiate. And then when it’s in that mode, the parent has kind of a level of control of that device. Is that the sort of thing where you basically, you could actually, with the right sort of structure and buy-in, have any Android device or any iOS device then kind of follow a set of rules? Because obviously there’s quite a chunk of capability that is built in and available on those devices. However, a lot of parents will struggle with how do we set that up? How do we control it? There’s not, you know, the same level of capability and effectiveness, right, as most people might actually benefit from.

Rory Birkbeck:
I think that’s where we need to get to. And we’ve certainly made a number of steps down that road. There needs to be interoperability from platforms as well in order to be able to do that, particularly from the likes of iOS at the moment. But there’s no real silver bullet here. So I think that there’s a number of different safety mechanisms that we need to actually consider. And so I think this is one really good one. We’ve talked about kind of the regulation piece. But the other piece as well is kind of separating out the networks.

Rory Birkbeck:
So you have a filtered network for your kids and an unfiltered network for adults. You know, we do that with our router and that works really well. And so I think that there is a lot of different parts to this solution. Yeah.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. And you talked about privacy before when we were talking about the under sort of 16 side of it. And it’s often raised that if you’re gonna do some sort of age verification, then look, most of the mechanisms ultimately will fail. And therefore, basically anybody trying to access, whether it’s social media or whatever you decide to draw a line around, then you’ve got a privacy issue because anybody going online then has to prove who they are.

Rory Birkbeck:
Mm.

Paul Spain:
Whether that’s using a digital identity or whatever. you know, type of mechanism. And then if you’ve gone through that process, then, you know, you, you have, you know, potentially, uh, a Big Brother type enablement issue. Is that, is that the way you, you look at this?

Rory Birkbeck:
Yeah, look, I, I think if you think about the perfect solution here, the perfect solution if we were to solve this particular problem would be something on device. So therefore the information is not leaving the device. and that there’s some sort of tech standard around it. So we know, you know, and through the technology and the transparency, there’s absolutely total assurance that this is not going to leave that device. And then there’s age signals that go out and get sent to all of the different platforms that need it.

Paul Spain:
Mm-hmm.

Rory Birkbeck:
Now, that technology does not exist. And in my mind, I think it’s gonna be very, very hard for us to get there. So, you know, I have a lot of concerns when it comes to the way that government IDs and things are being asked for by particular platforms. And certainly in the last 6 months, we’ve started to see an increase in that. So that’s where I think that looking at these other options is going to be much more beneficial to New Zealand. If you take New Zealand, you know, it’s a small country. You know, there’s literally, you know, 6 million of us or whatever it is. And we’ve all got ultra-fast fibre.

Rory Birkbeck:
You know, we’re a very innovative country. I think innovation is the real key solution here, you know, and being able to innovate on a number of different fronts. So through the telcos, through, you know, the schools, through all of the different mechanisms that we have, that is what’s going to provide the best solution.

Paul Spain:
I mean, ultimately someone has to take responsibility for these sorts of issues, right? Where do you see the responsibility for online safety sitting? Is it primarily parents, government, telcos, social media platforms? Who should own this? How do we get that right?

Rory Birkbeck:
Yeah, so I do think that there is a part that regulation needs to play. You know, there is no question for the accountability that needs to be put on tech platforms, particularly in the way, you know, that Australia has gone after them with fines and things like that. So, you know, I think that there’s a responsibility there for the government to step up and go, what are the standards, you know, and these platforms aren’t meeting them. And then how do we enforce that? That’s not something parents can do, you know. So there’s that part to play. And as I mentioned, those online safety codes and all of that type of stuff. There is obviously, you know, as parents, we’ve got responsibility, you know, and we need to be building digitally resilient kids, you know, and we need to be educating them. We need to be using tools.

Rory Birkbeck:
It isn’t always easy for parents, you know, with the complexity of the tech. And particularly for some of the vulnerable groups as well, you know, it’s very, very hard. And some of them are disproportionately affected by online harm. So we really need to consider those. And, but as I say, it’s more about interoperability. How do we get this technology to all work together and hold the platforms accountable that need to be held?

Paul Spain:
It sounds like there’s some more work, there’s some opportunity to be done. If we’ve got folks that are listening in who maybe they feel they’ve got some some ideas that could contribute to this as a broader sort of societal issue or to the innovation that’s, you know, that’s coming out of Safe Surfer, you know, are you happy for people to get in touch?

Rory Birkbeck:
Yeah, absolutely. We would love for people to get in touch. You know, it really helps when there’s a village, you know, and we’ve seen lots of support to date. And so really encouraged, you know, when people get in touch with us. Excellent.

Paul Spain:
Now they can track you down, safesurfer.io. Are you on LinkedIn as well?

Rory Birkbeck:
Yeah, I’m on LinkedIn. There’s safesurfer.io, you know, and there’s, there’s all the social channels. So yeah, definitely reach out. Yep.

Paul Spain:
And if someone wants to get sort of started with some sort of technology, with a book, they can find all about that on, on the Safe Surfer website as well.

Rory Birkbeck:
There’s a little chat bubble, you can click into that and start a conversation.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. Okay. Oh, that’s great. Well, real privilege to have you on the show, Rory. Thank you for taking the time.

Rory Birkbeck:
Thanks.

Paul Spain:
You know, all the best with the social enterprise journey. I know, you know, running any organisation has its challenges, but we’ve got to have these conversations. And if, you know, in every home we can be, you know, nudging forward and making some positive progress, then you know, over time we get to a, we get to a place where we do have a better environment for our youngsters.

Rory Birkbeck:
Absolutely.

Paul Spain:
Yeah.

Rory Birkbeck:
Oh, good stuff.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. All right. Well, that’s us for this episode. Thanks everyone for joining us. A big thank you, of course, to PwC, Fortinet, Workday, 2degrees, One NZ, Spark, and Gorilla Technology. We’re really appreciative of their support, not only for the New Zealand Tech Podcast, but for the broader tech and innovation ecosystems. that they get behind in New Zealand. So thank you.

Paul Spain:
We’ll catch you again on the next episode. Cheers. Thanks, Rory.