Combatting Cyber Bullying, Grooming and Trolling with EyA
Cyber bullying, trolling and horrific attempts of grooming children online has grown at a prolific rate over the years on social media platforms. It is not only celebrities and politicians being attacked, but literally anybody using a social platform
Only say online that which you would say to somebody in person
Cyber bullying, trolling and horrific attempts of grooming children online has grown at a prolific rate over the years on social media platforms. It is not only celebrities and politicians being attacked, but literally anybody using a social platform. The attacks are widespread and cause untold distress, mental health and even physical issues to those targeted.
There are calls for social networks to stop the creation of anonymous profiles, in other words social network users are indeed who they say they are. This forces people to be accountable for their actions, just as they would in the physical world. The development required for this is vast and many people will be reluctant to share sensitive details about themselves with 3rd party providers. Also, people’s identifiable information will still be stored in databases readily harvestable by attackers.
How EYA can solve the problem
EYA’s implementation and approach of Know Your Customer (KYC) ensures that a person really is who they say they are during the creation of their account using common APIs from companies providing KYC services. EYA then builds the “digital twin” of a person both during the initial onboarding, and also during the lifecycle of the person’s relationship with EYA and partner applications.
Utilising template bonding and encryption on EYA’s platform, a company application / service can engage and validate a person’s identity without ever needing to know their personal information. EYA provides the verification to the company application and it can only see information within the bonded template/s. As such the user is pseudo anonymous to the extent of the company application only being able to verify details, rather than extract them. For instance, a company could verify that the person is of a certain age, sex and that they have no other accounts with them, thus stopping the ability for a user to create a new account if theirs has been suspended.
Social Networks Use Case
Any social network can very easily plug into EYA and utilise the federated authentication service (in other words EYA can validate any person’s identity the social network wants to confirm). Through hosting their own node on EYA’s platform, the social network is able to participate in the whole EYA ecosystem and again, bond their templates to the person asset. This provides the exact ability to verify as any other service provider / application would.
A person could still be able to retain an anonymous profile through the use of a nickname, but they would be held accountable for their actions on the given social network and the subsequent banning of a user would be a permanent solution, rather than the usual temporary one when a user then creates a new identification. Also, the social network would be able to identify content which is appropriate for a person through verification of age via EYA. By also being able to verify the sex, the application would also be able to deem whether a person is trying to masquerade as another entity or sex.
EYA immediately delivers a huge range of services to any form of social network, website or service / app on any given medium from computer to mobile apps.
Verification of Age to control access and content
Verification of sex to catch people trying to act as another sex (grooming of children and adults is common with this)
Making people accountable for their actions online (Cyber bullying, trolling etc.)
Immediate halting of bots and fake accounts
Protecting people’s identity through pseudo anonymity
Obviously, there is no way to guard people from themselves and those who choose to use the dark web or unprotected applications will simply do so. If social networks and websites do join together, EYA can provide them with an immediate and unique solution.