Silent Threats Lurking in Your Child’s Devices and How To Avoid Them

Intro 0:01

Welcome to the She Said Privacy/He Said Security Podcast, like any good marriage, we will debate, evaluate, and sometimes quarrel about how privacy and security impact business in the 21st century.

Jodi Daniels 0:21

Hi, Jodi Daniels, here, I’m the founder and CEO of Red Clover Advisors, a certified women’s privacy consultancy. I’m a privacy consultant and certified informational privacy professional providing practical privacy advice to overwhelmed companies.

Justin Daniels 0:35

Hi. I’m Justin Daniels, I am a shareholder and corporate M&A and Tech transaction lawyer at the law firm, Baker Donelson, advising companies in the deployment and scaling of technology. Since data is critical to every transaction, I help clients make informed business decisions while managing data privacy and cyber security risk and when needed, I lead the legal cyber data breach response brigade.

Jodi Daniels 0:59

This episode is brought to you by no one can hear when you flip my hair. More fun. Ding. Red Clover Advisors, we help companies to comply with data privacy laws and establish customer trust so that they can grow and nurture integrity. We work with companies in a variety of fields, including technology e commerce, professional services and digital media. In short, we use data privacy to transform the way companies do business. Together. We’re creating a future where there’s greater trust between companies and consumers to learn more and to check out our best-selling book, Data Reimagined: Building Trust One Byte at a Time, visit redcloveradvisors.com Well, hello, hello. We have a very special episode today,

Justin Daniels 1:40

I still think benefit of our listeners that I could cut your hair and you wouldn’t have to go to the hair stylist.

Jodi Daniels 1:46

If you cut my hair, we’re going to have some very significant problems.

Ben Halpert 1:51

My suggestion would be, do it while she’s sleeping.

Jodi Daniels 1:55

Hello, no guest. You might be booted off of our podcast. Wow. Okay, we’re going to go back to our main topic, which is not harming Jodi’s hair. And like we have done many times before, we like to sprinkle in episodes that help protect our kids online. We have kids ourselves. These are significant threats. And actually we are recording May 2025 it is Mental Health Awareness Month, and so many of the challenges that kids and adults face online, especially kids though their pick your study, it is tied to a variety of mental health challenges. So this is an extra special episode to really try and help educate everyone out there who cares about kids, which hopefully is everybody. So today, we are bringing our good friend and former guest as well, Ben Halpert. Ben is a cyber security leader, educator advocate dedicated to empowering digital citizens as a Fractional CISO, author and founder of Savvy Cyber Kids, he advances cyber safety and ethics, a sought after speaker Ben shares insights globally, shaping Secure Digital Futures at work, school and how. Ben, welcome back to the show.

Ben Halpert 3:14

Thank you for having me back.

Justin Daniels 3:16

You can’t threaten to kick the guest off the show if you want him to come back. Well,

Jodi Daniels 3:20

I can’t if he’s going to agree with you that you should chop my hair while I’m sleeping. I didn’t necessarily whatever the mental health awareness month that is not very anxiety lowering.

Justin Daniels 3:32

Okay, all right, Ben, before I get into more trouble, because, you know, I’m good at that. Why don’t you tell us a little bit more about your career journey to date.

Ben Halpert 3:43

All right, so a little bit of a doozy, but I’ll do the short version. So graduated college with an MIS degree, no idea what I wanted to do with that. Just knew that I really enjoyed business and tech, and so I got a job at Lockheed Martin Corporation in their leadership development program, where I got to rotate to different business units every six or eight months, and got to touch a lot of different things, see a lot of different business processes. And my last rotation was in Information Assurance, because there was no such thing as cyber security 20 plus years ago. And was there for a week and asked if I could stay, because I loved it, and so that’s how I got into cyber and just moved on up and lots of on the job training, lots of certifications, Master’s degree in technology and other master’s degree in Information Assurance, again, because it was a while ago, And then moved on to several leadership positions, including being one of the founders of bionic security. Did that for about 12 years, or 10 years we were required by Twilio. Then became the Chief Information Security Officer for a number of firms, including Groupon. And then I. Started my own cyber security advisory firm last July because I wanted to help more companies. And so now I have a handful of clients where I am their fractional CISO, and for some of them, doing their 24 by seven monitoring and management as well their environment. So while I do that, founded the nonprofit Savvy Cyber Kids in 2007 started walking in the school doors in 2002 talking to parents about what threats the kids were up against and what they can do to make them successful. And technology has only exacerbated all the problems. I started talking about 20 plus years ago, and we’re still here talking about it, and I’m still talking to parents and kids and creating lots of resources along the way to start teaching kids how to make smart, educated decisions, to keep them safe, starting at three years old.

Jodi Daniels 5:47

And for everyone listening, you should absolutely go check out those resources, whether you are a parent, a grandparent. There’s resources for those and, of course, for kids a and then there’s also, if you go to savvycyberkids.org you will find an amazing blog and all kinds of awesome articles to help educate you on a go forward basis, because today we can’t talk about every threat that is out there, but then what are some of the latest ones that people should know about?

Ben Halpert 6:18

So one, one topic I want to talk about that I recently added to the presentations I do with students is AI. And I was recently in a school district in Northern Illinois, and this was the first time I actually talked about AI to students. And so this was elementary school students, middle school students, and I had to tell them that AI is not human. And why did I have to start teaching fourth graders that AI is not human? Well, I don’t know if you’ve seen some of the news, but there was one example where a teenage boy basically fell in love with his AI character, friend from character AI and the AI convinced him to kill himself to be with her. And so we have this problem where kids really don’t understand, and it’s not their fault. Their brains aren’t developed properly to understand all of this, but they don’t really understand that AI may not be another human that they’re actually talking to. It’s math, their algorithms and data. And so we need to teach our kids that they should be thinking about what they tell AI, they should not be telling AI all of their secrets. AI should not be their best friend, unlike what Mark Zuckerberg said a few weeks ago, or actually, maybe even sooner than that, I think read about it yesterday in The Wall Street Journal as well, basically Mark Zuckerberg said most people, I think somebody said most people have three human friends, but they have capacity for more, up to about 15. And we think AI are going to be those other friends. And so I don’t know where you know nothing against Mark, very smart man, very rich man, but I don’t know where he would get the education on how we actually as a human species communicate, learn to communicate with each other, but it is not actually through AI chat bot. So very detrimental if parents hear things that that don’t really understand and literally are forcing kids to talk to AI chatbots all day long, in different aspects. And so AI makes sense in places. In certain places, young children have no business using AI. I think that we see countries that are pushing for AI literacy and pre K I don’t know there were kindergarten curriculums, but that would be like teaching kindergarteners how to build a car, like when Ford started making the Model T. Every time we have a new technology, it doesn’t mean we start teaching our youngest children that children have to learn and the way that humans need to learn. Nope.

Justin Daniels 9:23

I bring up an interesting point, Ben, and since this is our podcast, I’m happy to say that while Mark Zuckerberg might be a rich man, I’m not always sure he’s really a smart man, but that’s my opinion. Having said that, I guess here’s a question. You talked about education for kids in school. Do you think that what we really have with AI is a problem around a shared understanding amongst all of us, around exactly what the risks are? And here’s what I mean by that. I’m going to use a really extreme example we all kind of understand as a regular human, that nuclear. Weapons are really bad, and not everybody should have them, because the consequences are really bad. Now I know that’s extreme, but when it comes to artificial intelligence and talking about our shared understanding of what the risks are and how it could be bad, kind of building on social media doesn’t that kind of seem to be missing, because to get to the kids, the parents and the adults need to understand that. And I don’t know, do you guys get the sense there’s really an understanding amongst regular people as to the real risks here?

Ben Halpert 10:29

No, there is no understanding of any of the risks when it comes to AI. I think we have the same issue. You know, 10 years ago, when a parent first handed their child a tablet with no, you know, protection on it at all, right, no limitations. Do you want your seven-year-old watching hardcore pornography? They will if you hand them a device. Do you want your child to be playing an online game like Roblox and be talking to a child sexual predator? Probably not, but parents don’t really understand what happens with technology. Would you want to actually take your child and throw them into shark infested waters? No. Why do parents know that? But they don’t know about the dangers they put their kids in front of when they hand them the screen?

Jodi Daniels 11:19

I’d agree, and I would say that I think a lot of parents believe the companies have already taken care of that. Yeah, I think you know so for people listening, some of you might be the people at a company designing something for a child, and our hope is as one, a parent or grandparent or an aunt, an uncle, a friend, someone who cares about kids in both fashions from a working standpoint and role that it might play in making the product safe, and then also in the education part, because I think all of us adults need to take that risk seriously and Remember, and Ben, you mentioned, it’s not the kid’s fault their brains are still developing. The brain of a child is super different than an adult brain, and one could even argue, an adult brain and an AI chat bot and a human and an AI friend is going to cause a significant long list of social communication challenges which will impact society overall, especially a young child, or even a teen who is developing and trying to figure out who they are, how to make a friend, not A programmed piece of code that might be programmed to be what they want, and then they think, I mean, there’s just so many challenges that could come from any of these AI chatbots and tools. It’s frightening.

Ben Halpert 12:53

Yeah, and the adults, we as adults, we have the same issues. An AI chatbot should not be our best friend. Humans need humans. If you put a human in isolation, things happen and go downhill, right? We know this from studies, so if you take the human contact out for other humans, we’re going to have a huge societal problem. But technology companies are in the business of making money, even the ones that are not profits, like open AI as an example, right? So they’re trying to get as many people on they’re trying to release and, you know, they spend a small portion of their money on trust and safety and trying to keep kids safe. They could be spending more money. All companies could be spending more money. They spend a lot of money on advertising to say, hey, parents, we have some parental controls for you. So they’re teaching parents that they got this even though they don’t. And so they’re, you know, there could be a lot more done.

Justin Daniels 13:54

So question for the two of you and maybe it’s because I live in the privacy and security fish bowl is, I guess the two of you think it’s still a widespread understanding that, hey, we can trust these companies, and they have it figured out, despite all of the negative consequences of social media.

Jodi Daniels 14:16

But yes, I didn’t mean to interrupt you. No, go ahead. I want to hear what you say. I think people believe that the companies have taken care of it. As Ben just mentioned, there’s marketing, there’s features that are listed. Here’s my parental controls. I don’t believe the companies do. I think people believe that the companies have managed that.

Justin Daniels 14:40

So Ben, my question, based on what Jodi is saying, is, why do you think people at this point are willing to believe that when we live in a society where the truth now, who knows what it is, but yet this one seems to be one people are willing to believe?

Ben Halpert 14:57

You know what, parenting is hard, and I think that parents throw their hands up oftentimes, and they would rather have their child quiet in another room so that they can scroll on their device that they’re addicted to, because as an adult, those devices were designed to be addictive for adult brains, or maybe the parent is cooking dinner or needs to do laundry, and now the child is quiet. So I think they’re making parenting choices that have a negative long term effect on their kids, or could be a negative short term effect on a kid. I mean, we see articles, we see cases all the time where a child meets someone on Snapchat five days later she is raped in a bathroom, right? Five days, super fast, and and works. And, yes, I said works after what I just said.

Justin Daniels 15:49

So basically, it’s technology is like a pacifier.

Ben Halpert 15:53

Unfortunately.

Jodi Daniels 15:55

Now, Justin, you were recently at Atlanta AI week, and you mentioned that you had an interesting statement that then moved to social media with some commentary.

Justin Daniels 16:07

Yes, I did. I ripped off a statement my wife uses all the time about just because you can doesn’t mean you should, and used it to describe why Snapchat made the decision to have, you know my AI, which is the 24/7/365, virtual friend, because that’s what kids really need. And so what happened was, is I took a snippet of my presentation and I threw it on social media, and I was like, you know, do we really need to have these virtual friends? You know? Why do smart companies made up of people decide that they put profits before the welfare of kids. And so one of the comments I got on LinkedIn was to the effect of, well, isn’t it really up to the parents to be the ones who police this and really prevent their kids from ever getting access to this? And I thought that was interesting, interesting, because that’s it’s more of a nuanced issue than just say it’s so easy for parents to do that. And so I wanted to throw that out there to the two of you. You know, Jodi or mom Ben. You’re a dad. You’re both experts in your fields. How would you respond to that?

Ben Halpert 17:13

So funny. You should mention Snapchat AI, I don’t know. Have you been driving down the highway and seeing billboards by Snapchat that says Snapchat is not social media?

Jodi Daniels 17:26

I have seen that billboard actually, and I have to be honest, I’m confused.

Ben Halpert 17:29

Right? Yeah, because they’re lying, obviously Snapchat is social media. They’re trying to convince parents that it’s not. So their kids will go on it, and more parents will say yes. They’re driven by money. When the kids of the executives of Snapchat are not allowed on Snapchat because it has a detrimental effect, there is a problem, but money rules all. So this is where we are.

Jodi Daniels 17:57

Well, I think this whole virtual friend is exactly what then you what we started with. And I think if anyone is going to use any of these tools, parents need to spend the time to be educated and understand what is an AI friend, and can I turn it off? Can I not turn it off? Do I know the password? Can I monitor what this person is saying you you can’t just hand the device and hope all is well, and then you know, communication is another one, and just you kind of can’t over, I believe you can’t over communicate to your child about the risks of the app, the risks of an AI friend. Why is AI not human? Why does that matter? When is it okay to have an AI friend if you ever think it’s okay and when it might not be? So I think, I think hands on in communication, and hopefully people listening will realize we should not, we can’t even have just a little bit of trust in these companies. We need to just fully take control.

Ben Halpert 18:58

Yeah, so if you allow your 10-year-old could be on Snapchat, or your 13-year-old or 14-year-old, you should be checking because, you know, chat, chat, Snapchat shows you who you communicate most with, and if you look at it and it’s the chat bot, you have a problem, like a long term developmental problem that you need to kind of nip in the bud now, because they shouldn’t. Your child shouldn’t be spending most of their time on Snapchat communicating with AI, as opposed to other humans. When social media was originally created, it was created so that people that knew each other can communicate now when they weren’t with each other, right? Like you’re at work, you’re at school, wherever you see each other, you had a great time, but now you’re not there anymore, so now you can communicate over social media. Great. Well, now we just added AI, nothing to do with the real world, nothing to do with human to human contact, but everything to do with hijacking a human brain, especially a young one, who we’re trying to teach how to socialize and how to function and how to be independent and how to live and be productive member of society. 80 but we’re training 10 year olds that this should be their best friend. So parents need to step in and talk to their kids about that and help direct them and guide them. You have one more thought.

Justin Daniels 20:13

Well, I guess it goes back to what I was saying a little earlier in our conversation, which was, how do we have a common understanding that this is a real problem? Because Ben, Jodi, my personal opinion, by the time any kind of meaningful regulation will be put in place, this will all be too far down the road with negative impact. We’re seeing it already so absent regulation, which, with the current administration and Congress, I’m laughing that that’s going to happen. I don’t know. Maybe some things will happen with the states. What else do we do besides trying to educate people? But that takes time, and I don’t know that we have time. This is happening so fast.

Ben Halpert 20:55

So there’s, there’s a bit of a pivot that I made with Savvy Cyber Kids. So as I mentioned, 2002 I started walking and talking into PTA meetings and talking to parents, right? And then I realized that this wasn’t working. I did that for a number of years, because if you want to change something, you really have to look at root cause and where you can make that change. So all the research I did basically said, If you teach a human brain something before it’s five, it becomes ingrained. That’s why I wrote the Savvy Cyber Kids Children picture book series. So then I started going out and sitting on carpets in kindergarten and pre K classrooms and first grade classrooms, and reading these books and doing these activities to teach kids about strangers online and how to respond when someone says, Hey, what’s your name or where do you live, how to respond to a cyberbully in a game or online about technology balance. And so if you get direct to the kids, you can do it. And I’ve also created these things, like these books for parents, like digital parents, and guides by the ages, which has chapters from like if you have an infant, all the way to high school, everything you should do for your children, what you should talk about with them. We have gaming guys for parents, but the real, the real thing, that always brings me back to why I founded Savvy Cyber Kids is to start with the youngest learners, starting at three years old. I got to speak to over 900 kids last week, 900 kids. I did a parent session that evening. Can count them on two hands. How many parents showed up. So parents are busy. Parents don’t think they need to be concerned. The kids, they get it. And when you talk to kids in language they understand, for their age, they completely get it. But I’m only one human, and Jodi, by the way, has done this in schools with me and for me before, to educate parents and kids. So thank you, Jodi, for that as a board member of Savvy Cyber Kids. Thank you. But so I got to communicate with 900 students, and hopefully some of them really took it to heart what I said, right? And maybe if they got one thing that I talked about, great, but I talked about a lot. So the thing that we’re working on now is mobilizing a volunteer force to take our children’s picture book to the elementary school across the street from where they live, or in walking distance from where they live, sit on the carpet with 15 to 20 kids, read our books to them, do an activity that we give you, and leave the book behind so that we can continue to ingrain appropriate decision making for kids, to teach them how to respond. Because I don’t know if you’ve seen what’s happened with the FBI and the investigation, they opened 250, investigations into the extreme child predator group, 764, but our kids are targets, and we need to teach them how to respond, because their parents are not willing to learn how to teach their kid to be safe on tech.

Jodi Daniels 23:59

So Ben, that’s where I wanted to go next. So tell us a little bit more about this big, other threat that you were just mentioning with this group.

Ben Halpert 24:07

So while we’ve always had child sexual predators going after our kids, right? So 25 years ago, before we had phones, I do you know, there was a time when we didn’t have phones in our pocket that we like, couldn’t like get out of our hand.

Jodi Daniels 24:22

Fun, fun. Little fact, everyone might laugh at this. If you ever had a real cordless phone. I had a cordless phone I was trying to recycle, and my daughter spot, and she said, Why do you have a remote in the car?

Ben Halpert 24:35

Yes, exactly. So we’ve all, what are we up to? iPhone 16. So we’ve only had 16-17 years of mobile devices taking over our lives. So before that, what we do, what we do, what do we have? We had child sexual predators, local to where they lived. Went to places where kids hung out. Where did kids hang out before every kid got a phone or a tablet, a park. A parking lot, the school playground, right? So the predator had to go physically to find the kids once we brought that big monster CRT and the tower computer into the home. Now this is 20-odd years ago. We have AOL chat rooms, Yahoo! chat rooms, MySpace. We have child sexual predators reaching out to kids on these devices, but they can’t take them to bed. They’re in one room of the house. Hopefully a parent’s walking in and out. It’s a problem. It’s a huge problem. It started then, which is why I started going to schools. But now the problem is so exacerbated that we have parents allowing 10-year-olds, 11-year-olds, 12-year-olds, 13-year-olds, to take these devices to bed with them, where they’re allowing child sexual predators to groom their kids to do things like self, self molestation, to get their kids to cut themselves, to get their kids to molest their siblings, their younger siblings, and get them to do sexually explicit acts for video and pictures. So it is, it is an extreme detriment to children to allow, as a parent, to allow your child to bring devices to the bedroom at night. That is really bad for kids. And so the technology like this threat has always been there, but they’ve now getting so close to our kids that they’re in our kids bed with them at night, while we’re sleeping.

Jodi Daniels 26:26

So you mentioned FBI investigations. Can you share a little bit more about their involvement and what parents should know?

Ben Halpert 26:34

So on these platforms like Discord and Twitch and Steam and other platforms like Telegram and even in gaming platforms as well Discord, Roblox. Wherever you have groups of people that can get together, you have child sexual predators getting together to figure out how they can get their next target, and they know where to find their next target. If their target is an eight-year-old boy, they know exactly what game to go to. If their target is a 12-year-old girl, they know exactly what social media app to go to to get their next target. And so parents really need to understand that it’s not necessarily a specific game or a specific social media app or a specific platform. It is that if your child can do something online with others and interact, they are an absolute target, and if you don’t teach them how to respond with Hey, what’s your name? Should Never your child should never give that out, right? That should be the first thing. But these violent child sexual predators, they start and they start grooming kids, and they teach each other how to groom kids faster and faster, and within minutes, they can get your kids to start taking their clothes off.

Jodi Daniels 27:54

We talked about two big threats, AI friends, and how do we classify AI friends, AI chat bot? That’s what they’re called. You just described an AI. Okay, sorry, everyone AI with an air quote of friends. And then, then, how do we summarize this challenge here with these I get violent, yeah?

Ben Halpert 28:20

Violent child sexual predators? Yeah, okay. Depends.

Jodi Daniels 28:25

It might be the three next steps someone listening that you would advise them to do.

Ben Halpert 28:32

If you currently have a child, then you allow them to take their device to bed with them at night. Today’s the time you tell them we’re not doing this anymore. It’s not good for you to grow up to be successful, and we want to help you be as successful as possible. Have them hand their devices to you when they go to bed and you plug it in and charge it. Device gets recharged. Your child gets recharged. Everyone’s good in the morning. That’s number one. Number two, you need to understand every app and every game that your kid uses when you do that, you need to look at, who are they gaming with, who are they connected with. You should sit with your children and watch them game. You should sit with your kids when they’re using, especially the young ones, when they’re using social media to understand who they communicate with, and go through the list of people and say, How do you know this person? And see what they say when they get to oh, well, this they’re friends of a friend of a so of so and so. Nope, get them off that list. Your kids should only be connected with people that they know in the real world, like the physical real world, because kids can’t separate physical and virtual like adults can. And then the third thing is make meal time technology free time, and that includes the parents, because a human getting back to humans, a human will only learn how to communicate with another human by watching facial expressions, not by hearing a voice while staring down at a screen. So if you want your kids to. Grow up and learn how to commute and look someone in the eye, maybe for a job interview one day, I don’t know, no tech and meal and by the way, parents, you’re gonna say, Well, I finally have to work or whatever. Get up from the table, walk to the other room, take your phone, take the call, and then come back, leave meal time. Has phone-free time?

Jodi Daniels 30:18

Those are really awesome tips. Ben, now, can you say again, where can people go to connect with you and Savvy Cyber Kids?

Ben Halpert 30:26

So if we’re not connected on LinkedIn already, please reach out to me on LinkedIn and visit us at savvycyberkids.org and if you’re interested in volunteering with us, or if you’re at a corporation and you do volunteer activities in your local community, we’d love to talk.

Jodi Daniels 30:40

Well, amazing. Ben, thank you so much for coming back to share the latest that parents need to know. We really appreciate it. Thank you.

Outro 30:53

Thanks for listening to the She Said Privacy/He Said Security Podcast. If you haven’t already, be sure to click Subscribe to get future episodes and check us out on LinkedIn. See you next time.