Digital parenting

0:00Hello and welcome to Tech Life on the BBC World Service, the programme about technology and its impact on all our lives. I'm Shona McCallum. This week, we're looking at one particular use of tech in family life, using trackers to know where your children are or your partner or other relatives. That's in a moment. Also today, I speak to the BBC cyber correspondent, Joe Tidy, about a gang of Russian hackers known as EvilCore. Just who are they and what have they done? Joe's co-hosting a new podcast about them. And a young engineer from Kenya has developed an app for deaf people so they can read sign language on a screen while people speak to them in real time.

0:40It's just earned him a prestigious award.

1:01We're starting this week's Tech Life talking about parenting in the digital age a challenge I'm sure many mums and dads listening will relate to So how do you feel about location sharing when children are involved? A number of mobile apps are becoming increasingly popular with people who share their every move with their family and friends. In fact, latest figures suggest 62 % of Americans use these kinds of apps, with younger generations being the most frequent users. Don and Shallon are two examples of mums who track their children. I caught up with them outside TechLife's HQ in Glasgow. We have Find My iPhone, we use that.

1:39share a location with my children, my husband, etc. And can I ask you, how old are your kids? 26, 24 and 18. OK, so kind of at the age, obviously, of wanting a bit of independence. So how do they feel about sharing with mum? Because they track me constantly. They do. Stocked. So, yeah, it works in both ways. It's more of a safety thing, actually, rather than anything. And they like to know when their dinner's going to be ready, you know, if I'm 10 minutes away or if I'm half an hour away sort of thing. So you're quite happy with it? As are they. or they would delete the app. Not doing it to encroach on your privacy or anything like that, but it's a security thing.

2:16Or Life360, I think, is another one. Yeah, I've got that for the boys. Mine are 23 and 22, and they both are happy for me to have that because they know I'm like, oh, where are you? It's what you're doing. So if you wake up during the night, you can just go into that and you see where they are. It's just peace of mind, and they're quite happy. As Dawn and Shallon alluded to, the safety benefits for parents and friends must be weighed against privacy concerns, One of the most popular apps out there is Life360, which has 88 million monthly active users around the world. And they aren't just location sharing with people, but also pets.

2:50I caught up with their CEO, Lauren Antonoff. The escape pet scenario, I think, is a real motivator. I had a story with my dog who escaped. That's actually one of the things that brought me to Life360. Tell me about your dog story then. I was in Las Vegas and we were going to a show where we couldn't bring him in. And so we checked him into a fancy doggy daycare and came back three hours later and he was not there. And we saw on the video cameras that he had escaped. We ended up camping outside of that facility for two days before somebody saw one of our posters and called us. We got him back safely.

3:29Luckily, he had been found the first day. I went straight from there and started researching pet trackers to find out if there's something that works. And I was actually really disappointed by what was on the market at that point. And I made an offhand comment to my husband that, you know, somebody should go and really figure out how to make these kind of things more mainstream so that people aren't in the situation sleeping outside of a doggy daycare. About a month later, I got a call from Life360 and they own some of the technology. and I have now been able to come and help to shape devices that really are more practical and really more ready for mainstream adoption.

4:06Now, I don't know how much you speak to young people, but there's obviously this quarrel, isn't there, around perhaps young people leaving home for the first time, going to university. We've all had those life experiences where we stayed out late or went somewhere we shouldn't have. I just wonder about that and how people are reacting to perhaps being in their family circle when they want that bit of independence and don't want to have their parents checking up on them. This is a really interesting thing about Life360. It's very relevant for me. I just sent my youngest son off to college a couple of months ago.

4:43So I relate to this. Some kids are initially resisted to being tracked. And I think that's sort of a normal push and pull with parents. At the same time, we know many other kids are finding that having something like Life360 means that their parents give them more freedom in the real world. I know where you are so you can stay out later. I know where you are so it's OK if you go a little farther. And so some kids feel monitored. Other kids feel freedom. What do you do with your own kids? I'm a very liberal parent. My kids are on Life360. They've been on Life360 for years now and we're not checking up on them.

5:20So they're happy to have it. There may be some families who just don't feel it's the right fit for them. And, you know, this notion of choice and getting to make a decision about who you want to share location with and whether you want to share location is up to customers. I think what we're seeing increasingly is this notion of sharing location is becoming more and more popular. And people are getting comfortable with it because the benefits both practically for coordinating and getting through life in an easier way and feeling connected, those benefits are greater than the concerns that somebody might be, you know, having their thumb on you.

5:57And I've been using it for a week or so now. And I'm surprised actually at the level of detail that you can get about your family, your friends' movements. I can even see how fast someone has been driving and rewatched their journey. Driving features are one of the main use cases where often people come to us when they have a teen, they have a new teen driver. And so there's a wide range of usage. The example of looking at driving speeds, that can facilitate conversations between a parent and child about whether you're safe. Some members who just use that to have a family conversation about who's the fastest driver.

6:37How much of your users' data, including things like these driving behaviours that it records, is shared with third parties? So we're very committed to privacy and protecting our customers' data. We know that they trust us, and we take a lot of care with that. We use data in two main ways. We have a set of service providers that help us deliver features like crash protection. They get access to all of our data, but they're building aggregated models that are very impersonal. So that's one use, where it's lots of data, but it's impersonal. The other is data for the purposes of advertising. And that's demographic data that's generally used for targeting.

7:17You know, how do we build an audience of people who commonly go to shopping malls, those kinds of things. I want to talk to you about this issue of invasion of privacy, if that's OK, because clearly in the wrong hands, there is a sinister side to this type of tracking. So our app is designed where every member of the circle opts in and everyone can see everyone else. And so we think this is one of those uses where we are providing a lot of connection and value and people are in control of their own experience. You know, if you want to turn off your location, if you want to opt out, you can do that.

7:56Nobody else has control over your ability to share location. We know that when it comes to domestic abuse, it can often be those closest to us. Criminal law obviously offers a recourse, but what do you think about the regulation of tracking tech? Should there be any joined up approach, do you think, with tech regulation, child protection, domestic abuse, these kinds of issues? I think protections for vulnerable populations are incredibly important. And, you know, we're supportive of things that are really helpful to protect those people. One of the things that I want to call out is that many people use many vulnerable people use Life360 to protect them in those situations.

8:36So, you know, if you're worried about an ex-partner who might be after you, creating a circle with people that you trust so that they know where you are is one of those ways that you can really use this technology as a form of protection in those situations. That was the CEO of Life360, Lauren Antonoff.

9:07This is Tech Life on the BBC World Service with me, Shona McCallum. You can contact us about anything you hear on the show. What did you think of my discussion about digital parenting? Maybe you've used technology to know where your own children are or maybe you think it's a bad idea. I'd like to hear from you. If you get a pen and paper ready or something more high tech, I'll mention our details in a moment. But first, thanks to everyone who's contacted us after our recent shows discussing AI in the workplace. We've been sent this WhatsApp message. Hello, Tech Life. I am Nakombe Motte from Yaoundé, Cameroon.

9:42I think that AI is definitely changing the way I work by making some tasks fast and more efficient. Things like research, data analysis and writing are becoming easier, but I don't think it will completely replace jobs. Instead, it will change the kind of skills that are most valuable. Those who learn to use AI effectively will actually become more productive and competitive. Thanks, Nkombi, for sharing your thoughts with us. It's great to know you're listening in Cameroon. Miguel in Madrid emailed us to say, my job has been very much affected by new technology and AI. I'm a professional translator.

10:24Well, I used to be a professional translator, as the use of AI-driven translation platforms has reduced the work drastically, to the point of having to change my source of income after more than 25 years working in the same and now obsolete field. Well, I'm so sorry to hear that, Miguel. Our recent Talking Translation episode of Tech Life from the 7th of September takes a deep dive into this area. You can find it online or from your podcast provider. Now if you want to contact us our email address is techlife at bbc.co.uk or you can WhatsApp us a text message or a voice note. Our number is plus 44 330 1230 320.

11:06Please include your name and the country where you live. And still to come, the award-winning developer of a real-time sign language app for deaf people.

11:24Cyber attacks have been very much in the news recently, with high-profile hacks affecting people around the world. Criminals have targeted banking systems, airport check-in software, and they've even halted the production of cars at one company. A new podcast from the BBC World Service is looking at a Russian hacking group called EvilCore, which has been described by the UK's National Crime Agency as the most pervasive cybercrime group ever to have operated. The BBC's cyber correspondent Joe Tidy co-hosts the series, alongside BBC Eastern and Southern Europe correspondent Sarah Rainsford. I'll speak to Joe in a moment, but here's a short clip from episode two of the series called Cyberhack EvilCore.

12:09In it, US private investigator Lawrence Baldwin is closing in on the hacker's real identities using a clue he found in an online pizza order. It's the healthy diet for the average Russian cyber criminal. But the payment details are encrypted. He can't see them. It did not list the address or anything, so I couldn't even tell if it was a delivery order or a pickup order. But I had the order number and I was like, this is probably enough. So that's a small taste of what's in the podcast. Joe Tidy, can you tell me about Evilcore as a group and what they're accused of doing? Well, Evilcore are probably the sort of OGs of Russian cybercrime.

12:55So they have been around since around about 2008, 2009. And that's where our podcast starts. We start right back at the beginning, how they were kind of founded, the origins of this group, how they were intertwined and sort of birthed out of another group called Jabba Zeus. And since then, they have been been chased around the world by law enforcement in the UK, in the US. But of course, no one's ever got very close to catching them because they are based in Russia. It's all, of course, alleged. I actually went to Russia in 2021 at the end of that year to try and find them, to try and put some of these allegations to them.

13:30didn't get them got pretty close though and the US and UK authorities accused them of stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from various different cyber attacks and cyber crimes over the last sort of 15 years including some of the earliest forms of cyber crime banking trojans where people were having their money stolen directly from their accounts and then more recently in the last kind of five years towards ransomware this type of cyber attack that we hear so much about that infects an organisation's system with malicious software and scrambles all the data and then holds it to ransom for sometimes tens of millions in Bitcoin.

14:09And you've described EvilCore as fascinating. What makes them stand out from other hacking groups you've covered? Yeah, I think firstly, it's the kind of longevity of them. So a lot of these cybercrime gangs, they will kind of come along, they'll make a lot of money, a lot of noise, and then they'll quietly retire. And when you think about kind of the cybercrime ecosystem, so much of that is dominated by Russian speaking hackers who are in places like Russia, where the authorities can't get at them. So what you end up with is a kind of a very frustrating situation where we sometimes know who these people are, and we can put names and faces to them, allegedly, they'll never obviously face trial, but we can't get at them.

14:49And I don't think there's any bigger sort of case study than Evil Corps for that reason. So Maxim Yakubets, who is the head of Evil Corps, the alleged leader, there has been a$5 million bounty on his head since 2019. And he and his associates are said to live a kind of playboy lifestyle of Russian cyber criminals driving around Moscow in Lamborghinis. And then of course, there's this really other interesting element to the gang, which is that they have been accused of working very closely with the Russian government on some unknown and unnamed cyber attacks against, for example, NATO entities.

15:26That has been the accusation, of course, from the UK and US authorities now for many years. There's been a huge international investigation. We can hear a clip here of Detective Sergeant Simon Williams from the Metropolitan Police in the UK talking about the scale of what they were facing. It was traditional crime taking place just happened to be stepping into the online world. Simon is briefed on the UK case so far. Some 600 victims, 1 ,200 unlawful online banking transactions and hundreds and hundreds of money mule accounts. It was a big problem, definitely, for the UK banking sector. About 4.2 million had been stolen between October 2009 and the early part of 2010.

16:16Joe, the scale was staggering, wasn't it? Yeah. And if you think about it, you know, he put the dates there. That was only a few months back in 2009, 2010. And that was only one country. So that was that was the UK. That was the UK side of this international operation that eventually did take down the Jabba Zeus gang, which, of course, was the precursor to the larger evil core group. group. But if you think about that, you know, if you add in the US victims, way more people were affected by that gang than the UK ones, lots more money as well, and other countries as well. And these guys were doing this in the early days as well, when, you know, there wasn't much cyber security around, people didn't have the kind of tools and information and knowledge of cyber attacks.

17:00And of course, police couldn't keep up. Eventually, they did. And one of the people, one of the key characters that we speak to in the podcast series is called Tank. That's his kind of online hacker alias. And his real name is Vyashislav Pensukov. And we managed to actually find him. And he's currently serving a prison sentence in Colorado, in Denver, Colorado, in the US. And we went out there and I managed to get an interview with him in the prison. And what do we know about Tank? Quite a lot. But he has been he was on the most wanted, the FBI most wanted list for almost 10 years. And the police were trying to get him for 15 years in, first of all, in Ukraine.

17:40And then but that's where he's from. So he's from Donetsk. And then he was in Kiev. And there was a big police operation to take him down and the Jabezus guys down and potentially, you know, other guys from Evil Corp. That all went a bit wrong, actually. And Tank managed to slip through the net. and then he was living this kind of um well trying to go straight in ukraine um and then uh he got back into cybercrime and ended up getting into the sorts of things that we see these days you know ransomware and he was eventually caught in a very dramatic uh police operation in switzerland with snipers and they threw him on the ground they put a bag on his head and handcuffed him in the street and um and i managed to to speak to him about all of those things and his sort of history of cybercrime when I went and visited him in prison.

18:22It was one of the most remarkable interviews I've ever conducted. I've been doing this job now covering cyber security and cybercrime for 10 years. And it just is so mind blowing when you speak to someone who was at such a high level in such a part of the cyber and the crime ecosystem that is affecting us almost every week now. You really are whetting our appetite. Where can we listen to Cyberhack? Well, it's on the usual places you get all your podcasts and you can find out more information through the World Service website. And the name of it, if you want to search for it, is Cyberhack Evilcore.

18:58OK, Joe Tidy, thank you so much for talking to Tech Life. Thank you.

19:09As a listener to Tech Life, you and I have the joy of hearing. Now, imagine if you lost some or all of your hearing. how would you cope? Well, a young engineer from Kenya has been inspired to develop an AI-powered sign language app that could help many people with hearing loss across Africa. He's called Eli Savatia and has created an app called Terp360. He's also the founder and CEO of Signverse. At a ceremony in Senegal, he's just been awarded the 2025 Royal Academy of Engineering's Africa Prize for Engineering Innovation. So we got in touch with Eli and I asked him how he got involved in sign language.

19:49I'll take you back to early 2020. I had taken part in a robotics competition, represented Kenya and after that I started an initiative where I'm training robotics to kids around the country and I had my first time interaction with students who are deaf. We had like approximately 400 deaf students in that audience. It's a mixed audience, but then only one interpreter. And you could see how overwhelming it was. I'm one for these students to rely on one interpreter, even for Q &A. And I think what this moment just showed me was that the ratio for human interpreters to the deaf community is not ideal.

20:32And, you know, Kenya is known for, I think, mobile technology, you know, moving money, you know M-Pesa and what would come in my head was that you know how can we bridge this communication barrier and perhaps bring interpretation to as accessible as a smartphone device that was the problem statement that I was looking at at the time and of course the idea has evolved over time to to what it is right now. And the winner is...

21:07Drugs-Eli Zavaccia. We'll come on to Terp 360 in a moment, but you have just been awarded the 2025 Royal Academy of Engineering's Africa Prize for Engineering Innovation. How was it to win that prize? The Africa Prize for Engineering Innovation won. I think it's one of the most exciting things that has happened to myself and the broader side of esteem and even the deaf community that we work with very closely because it just pretty much gives us that validation of the engineering innovation that we are working on. Brilliant. Well, congratulations for the prize. So tell me about Terp360 then. And that's the app that you have for people with hearing loss.

21:58What does it do? Yes, so our app, TAP360, it's currently web-based, though we plan to roll out a mobile application in the course of next year. But about TAP360, we like to call it Google Translate for Sign Language. So think of this as a visual Google Translate for Sign Language that interprets spoken language and text. to sign language using photorealistic avatars. And how this works, ideally takes a speech text input, then translates that to a visual photorealistic avatar that signs to relay that information with human motion to sign language. So tell me, Eli, how do you use artificial intelligence in this app?

22:50Yeah, so how we use artificial intelligence in Tab 360 Ideally, our AI-powered engine converts speech or text input into sign language. I'm using lifelike 3D avatars that look like humans and trained on thousands of locally recorded sign language gestures. So think a character signing just the same way a human being would, but now from a history of recorded motion capture sign language data. So it's looking at lots of data from other sign language that you've used. Could you just explain that to me then? Sure. So ideally how we do this is we work very closely with the deaf community. We work with them, we co-design with them the end-to-end process from product development all the way to shipping it and how we collect data, which is a paramount area of our work.

23:50Initially, we used motion capture suits. If you're familiar with like Marvel movies or Avatar movies, if you've looked at the behind the scenes, the kind of technology that is used to digitize and VFX, we use similar technologies. But now for this case, we have deaf people sign and we record their motions using motion capture cameras and motion capture suits. Then we have the bone rotations for the upper body and facial expression. So that is what we are interested in. Ideally, upper body, motion and facial data, which we then map into digital characters. And what kind of characters are they? Characters that are customisable.

24:33Currently we have four characters, but we are really trying to achieve a real-time human effect. Not statue, but just to have that lifelike nature, you know, it's breathing, it blinks, and signs, just to achieve a lifelike nature in an animated character. And which languages can it live translate into saying language? Currently, we translate from English and Swahili speech into Kenya sign language. And the underlying methodology is language agnostic and can be designed to be transferable across other sign languages globally and other spoken languages globally. And we are on track to support at least five sign languages by mid-27, including Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, South African, British and American sign languages.

25:37My thanks to Ellie Savatia, the creator of a real-time sign language app for people with hearing loss.