Practical Tools to Protect Your Kids in the Digital Age: Phones, AI Chatbots & Online Safety w/ Founder of Aura Hari Ravichandran

0:00The following podcast is a Dear Media Production.

0:08Welcome to Raising Good Humans. I'm Dr. Liza Pressman, and today I'm interviewing the founder and CEO of Aura. I wanted to do this because we had a recent episode that really freaked people out talking about fake friends and AI and chat GPT. And I don't like scaring people without solutions. And this is a partner that I feel really great about because they're doing incredible work. So we're talking to Hari Ravishanjan, who started Aura for general safety online. Like I use it personally, but then he started Aura for parents because kids interact in ways that we can't possibly keep up with. And none of this is meant to be like big brother is watching you.

1:05This is very much like an incredibly practical solution to safety precautions for underaged users of phones. And I really, I can confidently recommend this. Again, no secrets from your young people. They should know that this is just kind of like part of the deal, but we're talking about that today, what you can do to protect your kids from things like interacting with AIs as companions and the kinds of things that, that I probably scared you about during that episode a couple of weeks ago. So you can also get a discount. So go to aura.com slash humans, and you can protect your kids for less than$5 a month.

1:51It's really, this is good, high quality. I really wouldn't, this is too serious for me to mess around with. And I think Aura is a brand that I feel great about. So I hope you enjoy this conversation. I hope you sign up to get Aura for your kids, for their phones, and for any devices that you're using. And when I say kids, I'm still like hoping that they're much older than kids and they're more like real deep in teenagers, but whatever you're doing, whatever devices, especially because it's the holidays and one of the most asked for items is a device. Okay. So visit aura.com slash humans and get this on your kids' devices.

2:37Also make sure no devices in their bedrooms, no devices at mealtime and all the other good stuff that we've talked about so much. But today, again, we're just talking about this particular app that really does a great job at flagging when there's danger, keeping privacy when it's necessary, and supporting your parenting in this digital age. I'm really excited to have this conversation because we actually just had a really hard conversation about AI and some people were rightfully sort of panicked about solutions, in the absence of larger solutions for AI and social media platforms and young people.

3:21And so I think Aura provides that step to help parents feel a little bit less panicked. So I really am excited to learn more about it from you and give everybody sort of the, I don't, you know, is this peace of mind? I'm not sure, but some actionable strategies. So Hari, can you tell us about what Aura is and what you started when you started thinking about protecting young people? Yeah, so I can give you a little historical context and a little bit sort of the things we've been working on most recently and sort of the journey there. But generally, the way we thought about it is that over time, when you think about consumers and families, what you see is a trend line of people adopting more and more technology.

4:10So whether it's sort of starting like in the 90s with desktop computers and then you fast forward, you got the internet and then you've got smartphones and you got social media. Then now you have AI. Each one of these sort of big step functions in technology adoption comes with a ton of good stuff. And then it comes with a lot of stuff that is also painful. For all the convenience we get, we get a lot of the negative that comes with it as well. So our company has really been focused, I would say, to think about safety of families and consumers, but over time. So it doesn't matter really. Five years ago, we weren't all that worried about AI, but now we are.

4:47So how do we make sure that we keep families safe with the most current and pressing security and safety threats that they face? It turns out that maybe five years ago could have been transaction monitoring or scams and spams, which we still have today, but there's a bigger emerging safety issues where if you go talk to families, I would say four out of five families tell us that they are very concerned about the relationship of both themselves and particularly their kids' adolescents with technology. And that's with devices, with smartphones, with social media, the amount of time that kids are spending on devices.

5:23And generally feeling like there's this gap between what's really happening in the kid's life, which seems much more enhanced inside the digital world, even more so sometimes in the physical world. And parents feel like they have no visibility into that. And, you know, there's a lot of safety issues that come with it. Safety issues that are direct safety issues like, hey, are you getting bullied? Are you talking to folks that you shouldn't be? Is there private information leakage? And then the knock-on effects, which are, hey, you're on these devices so much that it's getting more and more difficult to have a real life set of interactions and healthy relationships because so much of the life is kind of getting translated to online usage, which then means that there's a lot of knock-on mental effects that come with that as well.

6:08So we've been very focused on all those issues. And I think that the latest version of our product now tries to identify behavioral changes in kids. It looks for things that could be worrisome, could be sort of risky coping strategies that kids are leveraging that maybe parents don't know about, all the way to, hey, what are things that your kids could be doing online that's really safe for them that lets them have a healthy relationship with technology? So I want to take it back. Can you just tell us overall, what does Aura kind of do? And then we can get into the specifics of how it can be helpful with the various categories of sort of digital wellness.

6:48Yeah. So what we do is to make sure that, you know, we're an all-in-one solution to make sure that we keep families and individuals safe when they're using anything digital. So kind of think of it as your digital safety net that makes sure that whether you're using, you know, computers, you're using banking services, financials, gaming systems, any of these things, any of the potential risks that come with it, we adapt your lifestyle and we make sure that we keep you safe online. And, you know, like I use Aura for me for making sure that I'm not like packed. But I think what we're focusing on today is, and I only say that to say it's a trusted source.

7:29Yeah, we have about 2 million customers that are using it. So it's got, you know, lots of folks that use it, leverage it, that seem happy with the service. Yeah. But what I want to talk specifically about are your parental controls, because I think a lot of people, you know, put like time limitations for kids' phones or they are embarking on. And the reason we're having this conversation is both because people are worried about this and want plans. And also it's the holiday season. And this is like such a big time to get a new phone or your first phone or your first iPad or something digital. And so with that, how do we set parents and kids up to do it in a way that keeps everybody safe?

8:13And I think it should be very open. Like, I don't think sneaky parental controls is very useful because it undermines the relationship. It's just very straightforward. Like, of course, we're keeping you safe. And here's how. So how do these parental controls work now? And in what categories? Yeah, look, I think you hit a lot of pretty important points. And this is what we hear from parents. I'm a parent, I have four kids, you know, I've kind of gone through this journey with my own two teenage daughters. I think transparency is pretty critical, like they have to be part of the journey, because at the end of the day, what we as parents are trying to do is make sure that we're keeping these kids safe and healthy.

8:52And so I think the notion of trying to sneak something in that they don't know about is both unhealthy and I don't think it's necessary. I think, you know, the way that I've approached it with my kids is to tell them, look, you know, they're in the middle of trying to get their driver's license now. Well, I'm not going to, you know, let you go drive on the interstate without getting a permit and until I'm sure that you are safe driving around. And this is the same thing when you go online. I want to make sure that you're safe and protected. And, you know, and that's how I think about these sets of controls.

9:20There's sort of two dimensions to this. One, there's basically just immediate dangers, right? Like if the kids might not know that providing, for example, their personal information or their physical residence or, you know, these types of private information on online services could potentially be exploited. So there are those kinds of things where you want to make sure that, you know, we're keeping those checked and guardrailed. There's another bucket of things which are how much are you using your device? Because, you know, again, you know, we're seeing more and more studies and we've done one of these and we've actually sort of released some data on this.

9:53It feels like with a lot of kids that have phones, it's almost akin to cigarette smoking because they wake up and the first thing in the morning that they do is start to kind of, you know, open their phone and they kind of go through all the stuff inside it. So it's the same sort of receptors in their brain are getting triggered again, which means how do you set healthy controls around that in a way that, you know, kids develop good habits. And interestingly, we talked to a lot of kids and a lot of them, if you ask them, hey, do you feel like you have a healthy relationship with technology? Many of them say, no, I don't think so.

10:24And then we say, well, why are you on your phone for so much time? They're like, well, I don't know how not to be. I'm just so used to it now that I don't know how not to be. So I think there's a desire amongst younger population to want to learn the skill. It's almost like a skill development about how to actually have a healthy relationship with technology. So there's that one second bucket. And then there's probably, I'd say 20, 30 % of the population that are probably in active distress, meaning, you know, they have kids that are developing negative strategies to cope with stress, you know, whether it's cutting or restricting calories, suicidal tendencies, all the things that I'm sure, you know, we see sort of in the media and we do see that in a lot of our population as well.

11:03Well, how do you make sure that you kind of help parents kind of understand what's happening there as well and give them intelligence? So that's sort of the three buckets is basically making sure we're doing all of the filtering of content. We're making sure that we're keeping kids safe as they're using online apps and giving parents insights into behavioral changes in kids. Okay, so how do you do this? And how did you come to do this? Because if you're comfortable sharing a little bit of your personal story, I think it would be helpful. Yeah, look, I mean, I think when, so Aura has always been, as I said in the beginning, in this family safety space.

11:41and family safeties meant different things at different points of time, just because the safety landscape has changed. And I'd say about two and a half years ago, one of my kids, she was going through a hard time. I think it was probably about February of that year where she was saying, hey, I just don't feel right. I feel bad, et cetera. And we said, okay, it might just be because you're overloaded at school. Let's wait till the summer comes along. And then it might get a whole lot better. June rolls around. It actually went the other way. She started having a hard time getting out of bed. She was very depressed and very sort of down quite a bit.

12:16And then we basically, as we're sort of monitoring and observing this, it got to a point at some point where we had to have an interception, like an intervention where it basically said, look, we have to get her some medical help. And we did. And that was a very difficult thing for our family. And up until that point, I'd never looked at her phone. She'd had a phone for about a year and a half at that point. And we were very sort of privacy conscious at home and we're, you know, want to make sure kids have a lot of agency. They can make their own mistakes. They can learn from it. And so we dropped her off at this facility and they couldn't have devices there.

12:49And so when I got home, it was a very hard thing to kind of, you know, drop your child off someplace, even though, you know, it's the right thing to do. Came home, I, you know, looked through her phone for the first time because that was the first time they said, you can't have your phone in here. And I looked at my wife and said, this is like super scary. Like I had no idea that it was all these things going on with this kid. And we see her every day. She's at dinner. We ask her, how are things? What's her ups and downs for the day? She tells us everything's fine and everything seems like they're going the right way.

13:20But there's this whole sort of internal thing that's happening that we had no idea all of this stuff was happening with her until we looked at the phone. And that ranges from the kind of influencer she's interacting with, when she's talking to folks about how she's actually feeling, et cetera. There's a huge separation between, we knew she was struggling a little bit, but the perception of what we had versus what she sort of self-internalized, there's a pretty sizable divide. And so I called our CTO and I said, listen, this kid's going to be back here in a couple of weeks. And I know we're going to ask her, how are you doing?

13:55And she's going to keep saying everything's fine, but clearly it's not. And me as a parent, I have no idea how to dissect between how bad things are. Is this just like a transitional thing. So what can I put on our phone that makes sure that we keep her safe? And we looked around, we spent like two weeks looking around. There was some like sketchy software out in Romania or something that was like a spy, like spying type software. I was like, I just don't feel comfortable putting any of this on my kid's phone. So the thing that I said was, listen, like we're very close to the space anyway, because we're worried about safety of kids, safety of families.

14:29Digital safety is actually very important. It's sort of high on the list for most families anymore, but there's nothing that's being done that is evidence-based. There's nothing that has any clinical backing. And so the two things we decided to go do was one, build something that families and parents could trust, which meant having a lot of transparency about what we collect, how we collect it, how we use it, how we're leveraging that information to give you insights. That was sort of one big bucket. The second is that it had to have some real clinical backing. So we hired a chief medical officer.

15:01Now we've got a bench of about 10 clinicians on staff that basically spend a fair amount of time helping to train the AI models in the back end, making sure like we don't want to have it to be like an alarmist thing. Like we see some solutions out in the market where, you know, they just send you like a litany of like alerts, et cetera, which causes more anxiety than is actually worth it. So from our perspective, it's basically the bar we've set up internally is if your child was in real life counseling, would the psychiatrist actually call the parents or not? And if the answer is yes, then let's send an alert and then kind of make sure that we're keeping the bar very high.

15:38So then we've done a bunch of partnerships with folks like Boston Children's Hospital, with the folks, I know maybe Katie and Claire have mentioned to you, but we're doing a big partnership with Common Sense Media that we're about to announce, I think, tomorrow. So we've been trying to work with people that really have that sort of vested interest in making sure these kids are safe and thinking about the product in that manner, basically. Okay, so it's so great because I do think that we have this other issue, which is that kids feel watched all the time and monitored. And then how do they develop autonomy and how do we support them this way?

16:13And also this digital world is fraught with danger. Safety issues. Yeah. Just because, like you said, technology has like a lot of amazing things and then it has some dangerous things and we don't have like the legislation in place yet for these protections. And so I think what you guys are doing kind of does what hopefully at some point. These things will just like be in place. So, yeah, honestly, I think they should already all be there. Like, you know, we shouldn't have to go build a product for this. we were already on a journey keeping people safe this feels like it ought to be about it feels like it's a long time away from coming yeah but but i do agree with you yeah yeah so i want to use an example i want to walk me through like i just want to use this example because we just had an episode on chat gbt fake friends and i think it really freaked people out and i try not to like my tone is typically fairly calm because I think there's, you know, very few things where alarm bells need to be so intense, but this has really worried people.

17:24And so I want to, can you sort of walk through a kid has access to chat GPT at what, what can aura do to help us assess what those conversations are and establish some safety guidelines around it. Yeah, no, it's a good, it's a great example. So I think, you know, if you thought about a kid's sort of behavioral patterns, the way we look at it at the moment, and it's going to continue to keep evolving, but we look at sleep as sort of one big dimension. We look at what apps are the kid using and what patterns basically, like, you know, what are the different applications inside. And then we have another big driver, which is sentiment.

18:06We're able to assess mood and sentiment based on many factors, including, you know, who they're engaging with, what they're saying to different people, what, you know, and basically, you know, even things like how fast are they typing, how hard are they pressing the keys on the phone, et cetera. So it's a fairly accurate model that kind of gives us that. And then for the parents that turn on keyboard monitoring, we have topical modeling. So we can kind of look at the big cluster of things that the kid is concerned about. So we set a baseline of what the kid's general behaviors are based on these three big dimensions.

18:38And then as we start to see variations, then we start to look to say, okay, well, what is actually causing some of those variations and then try to triangulate around it. So in the case of ChatGPT, for example, where a kid is effectively using the bot to try to get something off their chest, trying to understand something, they have some questions about something, et cetera, what you'll typically find is a fair degree of patterns around it, right? So if you take the chat to PT conversation by itself and said, okay, well, is this dangerous or not? In some cases, you know, if the questions are very probing, it may seem very dangerous, but it may not be.

19:17It may be just like a thing that the kid is trying to understand something and just having a dialogue with the bot. Sometimes it could be very subtle where it doesn't feel all that dangerous, but it could actually be part of a bigger systematic set of things that are happening with the kid. So when you're looking at this longitudinally over like a week or two weeks, you're not looking at just one conversation. You're looking at all these behaviors that are happening on the phone. Like if you think about it from a kid's perspective, they might get interested in an influencer that is talking about this particular topic, whatever it is that they're distressed about.

19:48I mean, it could be looking at blogs. It could be searching for stuff on the browser. It could be then also So having the conversation with ChatGPT, it could be talking to friends, for example, and patterns of those changing as well. And if you have topical modeling turned on, then you have the ability to kind of see what they're talking to them about. Though we never share that with the parent, by the way, these things go into the model. You read my mind. You read my mind. Say more. Yeah. So we will never share this with the parents unless like in real world, if you thought about when would a clinician tell parents anything that's like actual conversation, if they're about to hurt themselves or somebody else, then we will give them sort of raw information.

20:28The rest of the time, we only provide insights. And we're actually turning on features now where the parent can choose to show the same exact insights to their child as well. So there's full transparency. So the kid can also see what the parent is seeing, unless it's one of these very scary outlier type events, basically, in which case it only goes to the parent. So we take all these things and then we come up with sort of a view of whether we need to be worried or not. And depending on the probability at the moment, almost every one of these escalations now go to our clinical office. So the clinicians will actually look through the entire case and then they will reach out to the parents if it feels like it's a really scary thing, basically.

21:06So we actually do the work in the middle of that as well. Over time, it will be probability driven where basically if the probability that we're right is very high, the alert might go directly to the parents. if we're not sure it'll still go through the human in the loop who will then go through the case and then train the models further to say okay well these things happen here's how we need to actually think about it and like you know like interesting things will come up that are basically things that we don't know how to to deal with it right in the in the sense that like for example we had a case again it was it's all anonymized so we never see who the child is but there was a child that was looking at 2 a.m for testicular lumps right and looking for this and sort of you know, through a variety of stuff.

21:45Now we say, well, is it, so the clinical office was like, well, is this something that we should actually alert the parents about or not? Right. I mean, we don't want to be sort of, you know, in, in, in a privacy oriented challenge of the child, isn't ready to talk about, but it could be a safety related thing. So now how do we deal with it? And so again, our standard is always, Hey, this happened in real life. Would you be calling the parents? And we typically will check that with multiple clinicians on the team and then triangulate and say, okay, it is the case. And we have to do this fast because you can't give a lot of time lapse because some of these things are scary things and you want to make sure the family's able to intervene if, you know, if, if we're able to get to that pretty quickly, basically.

22:22It is so interesting because I think if you're totally transparent with your kids and teenagers, like, and present this as, and, and again, like thinking about this time of year when everybody's like gearing up to consider giving a smartphone or, or a device that it's like the, the time to say, here's how we're choosing to both give you access and also make sure that in this wild West, we've got some protections that we're going to be super transparent about so that when something comes up, you're not like shocked and feeling invaded, but it's like, you know, part of the deal. It's part of, part of how, part of the agreement, I guess.

23:14One million percent, I would say, by the way, like, so as people are going into the holidays, I'd say two things. Number one, wait as long as you can. You know, if you can wait till your kids are 15 or 16, and sometimes it's hard because all their friends are on devices and, you know, unless there's sort of a community agreement, you may have to get them a phone sooner because you don't want your kid to be the weird kid that isn't sort of in the group of people that are sharing lots of stuff on their phone. And it could be like actual, like, you know, this is how kids are socializing now, right?

23:44And so you don't want to kind of completely block that off. But if you can, I'd highly recommend if I could go back in time, I'd wait another two years before I got my kids' phones, smartphones, I would say. I think my oldest got it. Yeah, as long as you can. But then when you do it, cut the deal up front. Like, like if I would do it again, now I would make both my kids sign a contract saying, Hey, here's the deal. Like, you know, you get the phone, but here's the things I'm going to make sure are on your phone. Here's all the things I'm going to see. I don't, I want to be transparent with you, but you know, it's the same as if I bought you a car, like, I'm not going to let you go drive a car.

24:16If I don't know that you're going to wear a seatbelt, you've been trained to use the car, you know how to keep yourself safe. And so without these things, the phone is like that. It doesn't seem that obvious. It can be just as lethal as a vehicle. So I think in some ways, taking that kind of an approach and cutting that deal right up front is immensely helpful because if you go recut the deal, then you've got World War III. I mean, they're upset, they're screaming, they're basically trying to figure out 18 different ways to try to get the thing off their phone. So then it becomes a big cat and mouse game versus that's just the way it is.

24:52When you got the phone, you've got stuff with it that keeps you safe. And they're so excited about getting the phone that they'll be okay with it. Yeah, exactly. And I think a phone doesn't necessarily mean all these other features like social media, that GPT and all of that. And also this is another way to sort of monitor. And again, I just want to keep stressing this because I think it's so important. You're not secret monitoring. You're not, you're, you're really on the same. And by the way, like when we survey families, 80 plus percent of the families said, no, we just don't want to do anything sort of, you know, secretly.