Q & A with Entrepreneur Rena Harrington
B: You’ve gone from CEO of a group of Radio stations, to matchmaker, to online child-protection start-up founder – not the most obvious career path?
R: I had a 10-year career in media but when the whole economy collapsed in 2010. My husband Feargal and I decided to start a business. It was a really good time to start a company. Rent, advertising, staff - it was all cheap, so we could keep our overheads low while we got off the ground. We set out to make ‘Intro Matchmaking’ the biggest faceto-face dating agency in Ireland within 2-years and, with a little help from our appearance on the ‘Late Late Show’, we became so big that we couldn’t keep up with demand.
We expanded rapidly and moved from Dawson Street to bigger offices with more staff on Dublin’s Grafton Street. We then decided to set up an online dating site for people that still wanted to date in a safe, secure way but perhaps couldn’t afford the full ‘Intro’ experience. ‘Arealkeeper.ie’ was born and we were the first dating site in the world to use anti-fraud technology to give users an opportunity to verify their identity in real-time, and in turn, choose only to communicate with others who were verified. I had never been a luddite but I’m not a technologist, so I was a little afraid of AI, Machine-Learning, IoT – all those buzz words you hear.
B: Which brings us to your latest venture - ‘Cilter Child’ - protection software for smartphones. How did this come about?
R: When I was pregnant with my son, I kept getting served the image of Alan Kurdi, the little Syrian boy that washed up on the beach in Turkey. I looked on Facebook for a filter but they didn’t have any. I looked on the App store for one and none existed.
When my son Quinn was born, I became painfully aware of headlines of children having killed themselves after they were systematically cyberbullied or children being groomed by predators. The filter I had been looking for seemed a really natural fit for a parental control. There was nothing. Literally nothing. Parental controls for smartphones are all apps that operate on a peer-to-peer system so they cannot access data within other apps. They are limited to monitoring and spying tools.
We developed a disruptive modification to the operating system of the smartphone that can access all data coming into and leaving the device. So if your child is sent a bullying message, we will detect it and block it. If your child tries to send a nude image of themselves, the image won’t send or if your child tries to access self-harm material, you’ll be sent an alert along with tips on how to deal with it.
We are hoping to be the machine-standard parental control across all smartphones, so that ‘Cilter’ is available to all parents, everywhere, so we can reduce cyberbullying, increase early detection and prosecution of predators and save lives, by notifying parents if there is an imminent threat to their child.
B: Best of luck with it, Rena, sounds like it will really make a difference to the lives and mental health of children and families.