Child monitoring app Bosco’s founder opens up on privacy, India pricing

The interview hasn’t started, but Enon Landenberg has thoughts on Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation and India’s proposed Digital Personal Data Protection Bill. The GDPR “doesn't do anything, you know, it just allows you to delete your history,” Landenberg says.

“The markets which are the only places that have solutions that can help users are more totalitarian regimes like in Turkey and China, where basically, it's not for the end users, it's more for the government.”

Landenberg, 50, is the founder of Alerteenz, the Israeli firm behind Bosco, a child monitoring app that launched last week in India, with the Times of India group’s help in distribution, Landenberg said; the Times Group’s newspapers have featured advertisements for Bosco over the weekend, and put the company in touch with a localisation firm to get the app translated to Indian languages.

Bosco monitors activity on children’s apps, such as the messages they send, the content they see on platforms like Instagram, and uses AI to analyze their mood during phone calls. It does this by being installed on parents’ as well as children’s phones, and by getting permissions to extract text messages and record phone calls.

Landenberg said that Airtel and US immigration used similar techniques to gauge how upset customers and travelers are. Bosco’s platform re-learns children’s voice models every three months to account for faster pitch changes during childhood.

The platform then reports a daily breakdown of potentially worrying content it detects to parents. It also monitors children’s phone battery level, whether they are at a location marked by parents as safe, and allows parents to remotely unmute the microphone on a child’s phone. While the app is free to install, most of its features are behind a paywall (more on that further down).

Not all features are available on iOS due to privacy safeguards built into Apple’s operating system.

Landenberg says he started Bosco as something to solve a personal need. “I don't know enough about the day-to-day [lives] of my kids now; not in a spying aspect, but in aspect of helping them when they need me,” he told Entrackr. Landenberg recalled his parents being able to listen in on his landline calls and reading his sister’s personal diary every night. He said that as more communication moved to texting, parents have fewer signals to rely on for parenting.

But Landenberg said it was impractical for parents to spy on their children’s every move, and said the app only reports a narrow segment of content that sets off red flags to parents. “You have these parents that open the kid’s phone at night, and they read their WhatsApps and go over their private messages on Instagram or whatever. There is no way a human can do that,” he argued, as kids receive over 5,000 pieces of information every day.

He also took issue with parental control apps that try to restrict what apps children can download or what websites they can access. Kids “were born into technology and they know how to bypass all these apps. So you have a feeling that you are controlling them, but they are doing whatever they want,” Landenberg said. Blocking off internet access at nighttime, for instance, would be “isolating” children, he added.

“I'm not trying to replace you as a dad,” Landenberg said. “I'm trying to make you a better dad.” Bosco alerts parents if children install apps like Tinder, but doesn’t stop them from doing so. The app also alerts parents if children are texting about self-harm, suicide, talking to an adult that doesn’t appear to be a trusted friend, or are being bullied online. “My son can sit by me on the sofa in the living room and communicate with a pedophile, and I don’t even know because he's texting.”

The app also analyzes conversations to see if swear words are being used in a hurtful context. “A lot of problematic words are also used as slang for all kinds of good things,” Landenberg said. “From a research we did on our users, in 97% plus of the times that our users are saying ‘fuck you,’ it’s in a good way… It’s slang, like ‘no way,’” he said. “Now, we need to identify the difference between a good ‘fuck you’ and a bad ‘fuck you’,” now that kids are using swear words more and more often.

Landenberg said the pricing of the product was reduced to the equivalent of $2 a month for India; it usually costs over double that in other markets. “Even when it's a market [like India] that cannot pay too much, [the] security of children for two dollars a month, it's not too much.”

Despite such invasive features in Bosco, the founder argued that the data collected by the app was minimal, and that the company was not concealing what it was doing.

“We’re not hiding our service from the kids, we’re not hiding the icon of the Bosco app on their phones,” Landenberg said. “We want them to know that daddy cares for them.” He compared installing the app to requiring children to wear a helmet when biking. “My kids hate their helmets; they hate it. In Israel, it’s 100% humidity, it’s always hot here. [...] They're wearing the helmet in order not to walk. Because if I take their bicycle [for refusing to wear a helmet], they will have to walk.”

Landenberg also added that the product was aimed more at parents of young children than older teenagers.

Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay, an editor at the Privacy Mode project at Hasgeek, reviewed Bosco’s features for Entrackr. “I do not see that [Bosco] does anything different from what other apps in this category do,” Mukhopadhyay said. “Around 2017 the EU had a study conducted to determine the effectiveness as well as the value of such apps, and the results are not very encouraging.”

He mentioned a study by the United States Federal Trade Commission, which pointed to potential security risks in parental monitoring apps, like poor data protection leading to personal information leaking to hackers.

While Bosco doesn’t have an India-specific privacy policy on its website, Landenberg said the company would comply with any market-specific legislation.

All data that Bosco collects and delivers to parents is “double encrypted,” he said, adding that the company itself did not retain much data. In compliance with Europe’s GDPR, Landenberg said that the company globally deletes user data when parents uninstall the app. “It's actually good for us because if you're not a paying user, why should I host your data?”

“As a parent or someone monitoring I'd be very concerned about (a) accuracy of the analysis, (b) usage and storage of the data, [and] (c) security audit of the app,” Mukhopadhyay said, “and not many parents in India would yet be at all bothered about these.”

Quotes have been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.