Mircosoft released a tool known as “Project Artemi” yesterday to catch traps laid out by sexual predators online for children. The tool will be available to companies that offer chat function at no cost. The company has developed this tool in partnership with The Meet Group, Roblox, Kik, and Thorn. A team of researchers worked on a technique to identify potential instances of child online grooming for sexual purposes and form a reply. Kik’s involvement is quite intriguing as the chat app has been accused of being home to predators on multiple occasions. Maybe the app is finally waking up to take proactive measures for child safety. The company said in a blog post the algorithm is trained on historical conversations to evaluate characteristics of the chat and determine the probability of one of the participants being a predator: Emily Mulder from the Family Online Safety Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to helping parents keep kids safe online, told NBC News these kinds of tools can help curb child exploitation online, but they might not consider cultural and language differences: Zohar Levkovitz, CEO of L1ght, a startup that works on reducing child abuse online, said: Child safety has been quite a tough challenge for online companies. Last year, YouTube disabled comments on thousands of videos featuring minors to prevent creeps. In August, Microsoft said it has a dedicated team to monitor conversations on Xbox Live. In December, Instagram started to check the age of its users to make sure all users on its platform are aged 13 and above. If you’re a company looking to use these tools you will have to contact Thron to obtain it.
