Agent-Mediated Information Exchange: Child Safety Online

This paper presents a tool for agent-mediated information exchange between children while chatting online. The Internet plays a significant role in the lives of children today by opening up a whole new world It provides excellent educational opportunities, access to a huge range of information and can be fun. However, it can also be used as a tool to enable abuse of children in a variety of ways. There is the potential for pedophiles to misuse modern technology to gain a child´s trust by attempting to contact them through chat rooms and pretending to be a child themselves. Hence, there is a need to automate the process of monitoring information exchange when children chat on-line. An agent mediated autonomous system has been developed that is able to automatically block the transmission of personal data, such as addresses and telephone numbers to other users, if such data is detected in a message. It is proposed that this work is further developed to detect and prevent attempts by users to arrange meetings with other users. The overall aim of the system is to make it safer for children to chat online.