Press Release
SuperAwesome announces KidSwitch to detect under-13 activity in apps and sites
Kidtech leader introduces breakthrough technology which will remove the need for age-gates
NEW YORK (22/05/2019) SuperAwesome, the leading kidtech company, today announced the development of KidSwitch, a new technology which detects whether a user is a child or an adult without resorting to an age gate.
The company’s existing privacy technology solution is used by hundreds of publishers and developers to enable kid-safe digital functionality, powering over 12 billion kid-safe digital transactions every month. Integrated into apps and sites, the new KidSwitch product will use SuperAwesome’s proprietary kids content analysis to automatically detect if a user is a child. It replaces the historical approach of using an age-gate, which asks whether a user is a child or not (and which typically isn’t effective).
Using over 90 different signals, SuperAwesome’s KidSwitch technology can detect whether a user is under 13 or an adult within a small number of interactions, allowing the app or site to switch into kidtech mode (enabling privacy, content moderation, turning off inappropriate features etc) or regular mode (appropriate for adults).
Dylan Collins, SuperAwesome CEO stated “KidSwitch is the result of over five years of technology development and the commitment from hundreds of publishers to safeguard children’s digital privacy using kidtech solutions. Age-gating content to prevent access by under-13s is not a robust model. However, we’ve now reached a new generation of kidtech, which goes beyond a ‘sticking-plaster’ approach to genuinely make the internet safer for children”
Collins continued, “In many ways children represent the opposite of Silicon Valley. An internet for children is about privacy and curation, very different to the obsession for data and automation which has been at the core of the world’s biggest social platforms. With children now one of the largest online audiences in the world, kidtech infrastructure like KidSwitch is critical.”
170,000 children go online for the first time every day and under-13s comprised over 40% of all new global internet users in 2018. In response, governments around the world are passing digital privacy laws which make it illegal to track children or collect their data. However, virtually all consumer platforms (such as YouTube, Facebook etc) were designed around a data harvesting model, so are struggling to tackle issues required for children’s usage such as privacy, content moderation and age-screening.
SuperAwesome has been at the forefront of the emerging kidtech sector, shaped by these new digital privacy laws. Today its platform is used by hundreds of companies including Disney, Mattel and Cartoon Network to ensure that digital engagement with children is driven entirely by privacy.
