Everything is becoming smart these days, and as children are growing up in the digital age, it is perhaps becoming a challenge for parents to keep up with their children who are spending far too much time on their smartphones, and so there’s finally an app to help parents get connected with their children’s world.
There are many parenting apps available in the market, but they didn’t appeal to Enon Landenberg, a father of three from Israel, so he created his own one, called “Bosco” app that helps parents keep an eye on their children’s everyday activity online or offline without spying on them or infringing on their privacy, according to the app’s website.
The app also gives parents insights into their children’s mood and behaviour through algorithmic analysis of data collected from the kid’s smartphone.
The app has been brought to Macau by local telecom operator CTM, whose Vice President of Strategy and Business Development Donald Shaw told The Macau Post Daily in a recent interview at CTM’s headquarters in Taipa that with the development of Internet connectivity, smartphone applications have become very popular tools and CTM would like to introduce apps that “bring in more than just connectivity” for its customers.
Shaw said that CTM chose to work with Landenberg because his Bosco app is geared to help parent-child relationships “in a way that’s not putting a child in jail”.
“It addresses a very real problem in society, which was with all this technology, the relationship between the time parents spend with their children and what the child is doing, the visibility of that is becoming more and more of a challenge,” Shaw said.
Demonstrating how the app works during the interview, Landenberg said that he saw many threats that children could risk facing in the digital era.
“The things they can do today without us knowing are dramatically challenging,” Landenberg said, pointing out that parents now have no idea who their children are friends with online, no idea when they send out nude photos of themselves, what websites they are browsing when they are using their own smartphone, all of which could lead them to paedophiles and cyber bullying.
“When I was bullied in school, I went back home and I had relief until the following day, “ Landenberg said, “Today the kids come home and the bullying follows them with cyber bullying. Their friends block them on social media [and] spread all kinds of rumours about them.”
With these problems, Landenberg looked for solutions but at that time three years ago, the parenting apps available were either “blocking” or “spying”, which Landenberg believes would not work for children who need freedom and privacy these days.
“They are irrational ways to treat kids because with blocking, kids would find their own way to unblock the websites, it doesn’t solve the problem,” Landenberg said, explaining that the Bosco app, however, is designed for parents to protect their children by alerting them that their children might be, for example, in distress and then it’s up to the parents when they choose to intervene.
Using artificial intelligence (AI), the app collects voice, text, video and image data from the child’s phone and analyses them to give parents a simple interface showing whether everything is okay with their child or not.
“The app provides parents with information about their children that they don’t have access to, it by no means replaces the parents. It’s really to help parents get into conversations with their kids,” Landenberg added.
Landenberg said that he named the app “Bosco”, a name which Macau people should be familiar with, because he was with his children in Nazareth when he saw Don Bosco High School, and with some research, Landenberg found out that Saint Bosco “developed teaching methods based on love rather than on punishment”, and the app is “exactly that”.
The app is available in nine languages – Hebrew, English, Chinese, Bahasa Indonesia, Vietnamese, Japanese, Turkish, French and Italian – so far and can be used on both iOS and Androids.
For more information go to https://www.boscoapp.com/
CTM Vice President of Strategy and Business Development Donald Shaw speaks during a recent interview with The Macau Post Daily about the Bosco app at CTM headquarters in Taipa. Photos: Iong Tat Choi
Enon Landenberg shows how the smart parenting app Bosco works during the recent interview at CTM’s headquarters in Taipa.
