“Auditor by Securly” - free offering helps schools grappling with bullying and
suicides
Online child safety service announces free Google Mail and Google Chat monitoring service to detect bullying and suicide related messages.
In honor of Stop Cyberbullying Day, Securly, Inc. – a leading cloud-based provider of Internet security for schools – today announced the beta availability of “Auditor by Securly” - a free tool that helps schools using Google Email and Google Chat ensure the safety of their students by monitoring these channels for disturbing posts.
Securly has analyzed hundreds of thousands of anonymized social media posts on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ by students of thousands of middle schools and high schools across America. Securly found that the average school district in its study saw a high risk bullying or depression related social media post every month.
Securly’s cloud-based web-filter has pioneered the use of automated sentiment analysis algorithms for flagging social-media posts as bullying and self-harm related. With its recent Delegated Administration feature, district guidance counsellors and school principals now have the ability to be alerted on these flagged activities allowing the district IT team to focus on infrastructure related operations.
Separately, Securly has also pioneered a parent portal and app that allows parents to be notified of flagged activities involving their children. With the Auditor product, Securly allows the IT admins to now be able to automatically flag bullying and self-harm related messages inside Google Mail and Google Chat and notify parents, teachers and guidance counsellors of these at-risk students. Google Mail and Google Chat have become the de facto email and chat services used by K-12 schools, and these services have been left out from traditional web-filtering.
Securly’s flagship product - the cloud-based web-filter continues to be a paid premium service that provides a complete appliance replacement to filter all devices. The Auditor product is focused on Google Mail and Google Chat monitoring using Google’s provided APIs and Securly’s proprietary sentiment analysis algorithms. By making the Auditor product free, Securly hopes even schools using competing web-filtering products can make use of this tool to audit emails and chats not monitored by their filters.
Says Michael Keough of Dumas ISD, USA about the release of Auditor - “Going with Google Apps was one of the best decisions our school ever made. However, in making such a move many questions arise like, ‘How do we protect our kids on Email and Chat, enforce our AUP, and encourage Digital Citizenship?’ A free tool to help with this need would have a dramatic impact on education and help schools and technology administrators focus more on what matters which is educating and protecting students.”
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