Safety tech firms get £350k boost to tackle online child abuse
- Researchers have revealed UK firms boast a 25% market share of the global safety tech sector.
- Three UK start-ups have won government money to fund their developments.
- The firms that are to benefit from funding are the Centre for Factories of the Future, for their ‘CSAM Guard’ tool; Vistalworks; and CameraForensics.
- Tech minister Paul Scully has called the sharing of child sexual abuse material, “a plague in the deepest parts of the internet” that must be stopped.
- The UK safety tech industry develops solutions to keep people safe online and employs 3,300 people across 130 firms, a 16% rise from the Safety Tech Sector 2023 analysis.
- The projects will receive funding from Innovate UK and will run until 2024 before presenting results on how their tools can detect and disrupt the sharing of CSAM.
- For more, please visit the City A.M website.
Cheltenham company launches new AI chatbot to help keep children safe online
- A Cheltenham-based EdTech start-up, Digital Woof is launching a new AI chatbot ‘Ask FiDO’, designed to help parents safeguard their children online.
- The company’s app ‘FiDO’, which stands for Family Independent Devices Online, provides free resources and support on online apps and games to parents and carers.
- The chatbot allows users to ask questions on specific topics such as, ‘How do I stop strangers contacting my child on TikTok?’.
- They will receive tailored advice from trusted sources, for example, the Internet Watch Foundation and the NSPCC.
- For more, please visit the So Glos website.
Northern Ireland Strikes: 5 special schools to close
- The Education Authority has warned that at least five special schools will close for a week due to strike action by Unite union.
- Around 700 members of Unite who work for the Education Authority will be taking strike action.
- Schools include, Glenveagh School in Belfast and Rossmar School in Limavady among others.
- They are striking over the failure to implement a review which would have led to significant increases in pay.
- For more, go to the BBC’s website.
