Safety Tech Challenge Fund - Ian Stevenson (Cyacomb) video transcript

Hello, I'm Ian Stevenson, CEO of Cyacomb. We worked on a project with the Internet Watch Foundation, the University of Edinburgh and Crisp Thinking to produce a solution called Cyacomb Safety for end-to-end encrypted messaging.

The objective of this project was to detect known Child Sexual Abuse material in end-to-end encrypted messaging environments by matching against authoritative databases, such as the one that the Internet Watch Foundation has built, while completely preserving user privacy and security.

The key benefit of being part of the Challenge Fund was the opportunity to work collaboratively with stakeholders in government, and the Home Office, in GCHQ, and the Information Commissioner's Office in DCMS, and to understand how they were looking at the problem from a policy point of view, so we could work out how to produce technology solutions.

The next step for us is seeing the solution habits first operational deployments. We're working to deliver that right now. We believe that the real opportunity for this technology will come as regulation kicks in, as the Online Safety Bill takes effect in the UK and other regulations in Europe, and elsewhere in the world, require the deployment of this type of technology.

The Safety Tech Challenge Fund was really important as an opportunity to work on technologies for which we want there to be a market, we want there to be change in society. But there isn't yet a market and so commercial investment on its own isn't going to drive their development.

The Safety Tech Challenge Fund gave us the financial investment and the stakeholder access to develop the solution but it also gives us our investors and others confidence that this is an important direction of travel and something worth investing in further.