Frequently Asked Questions About Monitor

This article is for all Monitor users.

What is Monitor?

Monitor is a proactive, real-time digital monitoring solution for K-12 schools that combines AI and human moderation to provide a 24/7/365 alerting service. A highly trained team monitors your alerts and will notify you of risks appropriate to a student’s grade, meaning you can concentrate on providing support to the pupils in your care.

How does Monitor work?

Our software inspects the text the users enter into their devices (including text the users delete and text before it is encrypted). When a potential risk is detected, Monitor captures and stores a screenshot of the users’ screen. Human Moderators review the screenshots and text captures to verify the Events in Monitor. 

Your school’s Safeguarding Contacts receive Alert notifications about high-risk Events by phone and email. In addition to the Alert notifications, your Safeguarding Contacts can log in to the Monitor Portal to view all Events. 

Over time, Monitor learns from the users’ online behaviour. Monitor adapts the Alerting to those users who consistently engage in risky online activities versus users who have a one-off Event. Your school’s Safeguarding Contact can also customise the Alerting Profiles for the Safeguarding Contacts supporting different Groups of users at your school.

Do I need the Filter & Firewall?

No. Monitor can be used as a standalone product. However, you can integrate Monitor with Smoothwall Filter & Firewall to enhance the safety for your users. By blocking known categories of risky content with the Filter & Firewall you can reduce the number and severity of Alerts your school Contacts need to review in Monitor.

How do we install Monitor?

Your school IT can push the Monitor Client software to devices using your school's Mobile Device Management (MDM) and endpoint management tools. They can manually install the Monitor Client on individual devices, as needed too. 

Does Monitor work with all keyboards?

Monitor is designed to work with all hardware keyboards, as well as Bluetooth and virtual keyboards. Monitor cannot inspect voice assistants like Cortana, Siri or Google Assistants.

How is Monitor text capture triggered?

The Monitor Client automatically starts capturing text when a user types. The capture stops when the user presses enter or has stopped typing, for example when a page loads.

The captures work even when the Device is not connected to the internet. As soon as the Device has an internet connection, the captures are stored in the Monitor Cloud. 

How do I know Monitor is working?

Your IT Contacts can log into Monitor and view the status of all Devices they installed the Monitor Client on. They list can be filtered for Devices not seen recently or for several days.

How do you know Monitor is sending the correct alerts?

Our human Moderators check the captures that are flagged by our algorithms as risky Events. 

The data from the moderated Events are anonymised and then is used to train our Monitor algorithm. Our technical team checks the updated algorithm before it goes live, to avoid amplifying bias. For example, our team would ensure a bias does not assume male instead of female users. 

Our technical team reviews the changes over time to explain how Risk Levels are identified in each Event Type.  The continuous training ensures our Monitor algorithm helps Monitor to correctly identify evolving and new behaviours in addition to previously known threats.

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Image 1. A sample email alert from Monitor.

Can Monitor capture banking or personal information?

Yes and no. 

No, if the user is visiting a known banking, financial or government website or app. The Monitor Client will not capture text from the list of these saved websites. Additionally, the Monitor Client recognises the format of login, password, and account fields. Monitor will not capture text entered into these fields.

Yes, when the activity is on an unknown website or the fields do not have the standard formatting (for example a competition website). When the captured text is sent to the Monitor Cloud, our algorithm inspects the data for patterns matching personal data. Captures with potential personal data are flagged and the text is redacted (hidden) to ensure Moderators do not see users’ sensitive data.

In the case that the redacted data was misidentified and is actually part of an Event, the Moderators can raise the Event and the potentially sensitive flagged capture can be reviewed by an authorised Monitor manager.

Are users’ private data safe in Monitor? 

Yes. We protect the privacy of all users’ data by strictly restricting the use of the data to Monitor. Our Privacy Policy details our legal compliance with legislation in Australia and New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. We even have a simplified version of our Privacy Policy for children who want to know about the privacy of their data. 

Who can see the Monitor data?

Only authorised Moderators and Contacts your school adds in Monitor can view data from the Groups of users they support. Moderators and Contacts can only view the details allowed by their role. For example, an IT Contact cannot access any pages with Event data and only views the technical information for devices running the Monitor Client.

Your school and people on the internet cannot read the data sent through your school network or the internet. The Monitor Client encrypts the data before it is sent to the Monitor Cloud. The Monitor Cloud stores the data using Microsoft’s security and “encryption-at-rest”. Monitor Cloud complies with the data sovereignty rules in your region.

How long is data retained?

The encrypted data (including screenshots, text, and redacted text) are stored for 15 months and then automatically, permanently deleted.

 

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