Netsweeper Student Protection Platform

Every child who accesses the Internet requires equal duty of care regardless of their social status or geolocation. A solution is required that ensures children are protected from harm when using the Internet and provides alerts to schools to identify at-risk behavior including signs of bullying, mental health issues, or self-harm. Proactively addressing these issues at an early age will prevent more serious and potentially debilitating mental health issues later in life. Netsweeper can provide this proven duty of care tool for K-12 children in a sustainable commercial method. Currently, governments have mandated that companies in industries such as tobacco, alcohol, and internet gambling spend a portion of their revenue to ensure that children in the K-12 age group are not adversely affected by their advertising. Through our platform, these same organizations can fund the school’s student remote learning protection system and deliver government approved messaging to students directly.

Mental health related issues are a global concern and the ability to address these issues early is a critical factor to minimize their effect on children’s health later in life. Netsweeper’s solution will ensure the physical safety and mental health of learners by providing a cloud-based tool that will allow schools to proactively detect signs of bullying or depression and other at-risk behavior and alert safeguarding leaders to take action to support the student. Netsweeper can also integrate into this solution an innovative messaging system for educational content. Currently, educational messaging is available on other channels such as social media but with Netsweeper that content can be sent directly to the student’s device. Funding from organizations and government bodies spent on other unmeasurable channels can be directed to this platform with more accurate and measurable analytics. Funds from this educational messaging content can provide a sustainable funding model for schools providing equitable access to this important safeguarding technology.

Part of the Netsweeper Student Protection platform includes a device client application that is installed on school owned devices. As students are on the internet and attempt to go to a restricted harmful site, the system will intercept these requests and serve an educational message to the student. For example, if a student was looking for information on how to commit suicide, a message with crisis hotline information could be sent to the student and alerts sent to the school. In addition to URL requests, Netsweeper’s client uses OCR and AI technology to detect harmful behavior on device screens and within apps. As the client software scans and analyzes content on the screen it may detect phrases which indicate at-risk behavior. The software will take a screenshot of the content and send this information in an alert to the digital safeguarding leader.

The messaging system can redeploy money already being spent by governments and companies and provide a more effective platform for delivery and measurable results. This money can offset the platform expense to the school so that educational funding can be spent elsewhere and also get important health-related content directly on the student’s devices.

Netsweeper is a global company with a mission to make the Internet a safer place to learn, work, and play. Our solution is designed to keep K-12 students protected from accessing harmful content on websites, promote student learning engagement, and ensure student’s mental health issues are identified and addressed proactively. The COVID-19 pandemic has increased the need to deliver effective remote learning, but it has also led to more issues in mental health and engagement in learning. As schools address these issues, it is important that there is technology available so that they can deliver effective remote learning at scale while at the same time protecting students against factors affecting mental health. This technology cannot be dependent on limited budgets. Harmful content and activity are everywhere. A self-funding model that provides the technology required in a cost-effective and sustainable method is required to ensure students in all economic areas are served equally. With over 20 years’ international experience working in the education sector and partnering with global partners in the space, Netsweeper has a deep understanding of the needs of schools as they ensure proper duty of care to their students.

Our solution is most closely aligned with the challenge to ensure physical safety and mental health of learners as our platform provides the tools schools need to monitor online activity and provide alerts as required to protect students as they show at-risk behavior. Our solution also works to increase engagement in learners in remote or hybrid environments as our tool restricts access to non-school related websites. The ability to provide these tools within a new and disruptive funding model will ensure that the technology is available across all schools regardless of public funding.

Netsweeper currently deploys a cloud-based web filtering protection solution to over 650 schools. This has been commercialized for over 20 years with over 2 million students currently protected. We are in the pilot stage for an Educational Messaging solution with a school district of over 300 schools. The funding model is under development however, the underlying technology is proven.

The Internet has impacted youth mostly in a positive manner however, the internet has also accelerated societal problems such as drug abuse, harmful content, cyberbullying, pornography, CSAM (child sexual abuse material), terrorist recruitment, and other serious challenges. 

The power of the Internet to adversely affect society can be changed not only through Netsweeper’s advanced monitoring solution for students but also through the funding for this technology for all schools in all countries. 
Our approach, using our technology for digital monitoring coupled with our patented system for educational messaging, recycles funding already allocated to communicate to youth in a more data driven impactful manner. With this funding, Netsweeper will enable schools to provide every youth with this solution and improve protection in remote learning environments. This will result in better protection for youths from mental health related issues which will provide a great benefit to the student, society at large, and future generations.

Netsweeper as a company has two areas of operation — education and telecom regulation.  Currently, we are serving over 800 million users for both these operations with the majority of this being in telecom for enforcing the laws on the internet. The Netsweeper telecom regulatory solution sits in the core of the ISPs and countries networks and filters out illegal material. Most of the material we are asked to filter is child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and human trafficking material. Of those 800 million users, 6.5 million are students. Within one year, we expect the overall estimated total of users that we service to be 1.3 billion, with students making up 8.5 million of that estimated total. Within 5 years, we estimate the total amount of users in the world to be in the 2.5 billion range, with students making up 35 million of that estimate. 

We are measuring our progress towards our impact goals through our success  with school adoption of the student protection platform, as well as our onboarding of partners for education messaging content. 

Ongoing measurement of success will include: impression of content by students, actions taken by students taken on content (clicks) as well as qualitative feedback from school administrators. 

We have 52 fulltime staff and 3-5 part time consultants working for us at any given time. 

For over 21 years, Netsweeper has delivered an ever improving and evolving web content filtering solution to protect students from online harmful content. Netsweeper is comprised of highly skilled technology, marketing, sales, quality control, customer success, support/sales engineers, sales, and finance team members. Netsweeper has implemented web filtering for thousands of schools and millions of pupils. With a 99% retention rate, we are ready to offer a pupil protection plan to equalize the protection of children no matter what level of status or budget. Netsweeper has continuously overcome the vast, everchanging challenges of the Internet over the last 21 years and is well prepared to continue to meet these never-ending challenges in the WWW. Netsweeper’s daily challenge of managing the content in the entire world’s internet creates challenges that enable you to want to come to work daily and tackle the technology world we live in today. Today, the internet is life. This is the place to be working and making a difference. With people, process, and product in mind, Netsweeper uses an agile scrum development environment to design, deliver, execute, and implement our structured release schedules to meet and exceed the current and future need of our customers. The executive team continues to define, measure, analyze, improve, and control with weekly KPI and KRA metric meetings, strong financial governance, and continuous improvement to our culture. 

Netsweeper supports a barrier-free work environment that seeks to be inclusive, diverse, and accessible to individuals that may otherwise experience discriminatory practices based on grounds such as: race, marital status, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, disability, religious belief, and other protected grounds.  

Our goals are for our workforce to be representative of all segments of society and for our team members to feel respected and able to give their best. Diversity in the workplace is both a lawful and ethical practice as well as a strong business practice.  

All personnel actions regarding hiring, compensation, promotion, benefits, job assignments, company programs or events, etc. are completed based on standardized eligibility amounts and performance. Netsweeper will always seek to hire the most qualified candidate for a position. The search and hiring process is performed in a fair and equitable manner, and the appropriate qualifications of each candidate are the only criteria upon which a hiring or promotion decision is made. 

Netsweeper also opposes and seeks to avoid all forms of unlawful discrimination. This includes in pay and benefits, terms, and conditions of employment, dealing with grievances and discipline, leaves for health or parenthood, and selection for employment, promotion, training, or other developmental opportunities.

Team members are required to complete training related to human rights, discrimination, and anti-bullying to increase their knowledge and awareness about diversity and discrimination and to help all team members learn ways to support others.

Mentoring and strategic advice that could allow Netsweeper to reach influencers and decision makers in education, government institutions, regulatory bodies, and partners in industries for educational messaging. 

• Public relations: reach government and industry partners to develop content 
• Product/Service Distribution: Government regulatory bodies, tobacco companies, drug companies to create education messaging programs.
• Legal or regulatory matters: eRate funding consultation on program compliance

1. Addiction relating organizations that deal with bullying and mental health 
2. Mackenzie Bezos, Melissa Gates: charitable foundations that want to communicate to children and can use the Netsweeper platform