5 K-12 Transitions and Supports

Speakers: Scott Beddall, Ministry of Education and Sam Jingfors, Safer Schools Together

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Video Transcript

Jennifer Jordan: I’d like to welcome back [Carrie 00:00:06] from the Ministry of Advanced Education Skills and Training to give us a little bit of context for our next session. Thank you.

Carrie Dusterhoft: Hi, everyone. Just a really quick context piece for the K to 12 agenda item that we have coming up. One of the themes that came up frequently in our outreach campaign feedback was the need for the K to 12 and PSI sectors to work more closely together to insure better transitions for students. So, through some initial discussions with Scott, who you’ll be hearing from shortly, it became apparent to us that there were a lot of things going on in the K to 12 sector that aligned with areas of interest on the post-secondary side.

Carrie Dusterhoft: So, we think there may be some good opportunities to build on the work in the K to 12 sector, to partner or to leverage resources, but we thought it was important to have that discussion at the forum to help guide us in terms of where we might focus our efforts. So, I would be very interested to hear if something sparks from this discussion that Scott and Sam will have today, and if so, please add any thoughts that come up on the graffiti walls. So with that, I’d like to introduce Scott Beddall from the Ministry of Education, and Sam Jingfors from Safer Schools Together.

Scott Beddall: Okay. So, hi everyone. My name’s Scott Beddall. I’m the Director of Wellness and Safety with Ministry of Education, and I really appreciate the opportunity to be here. I’m going to talk a little bit about the overall sort of context and background about what we’re doing in K to 12 around the students’ safety, and then I’m going to pass it over to my colleague, Sam, who’s going to dive into some of the services and supports that they provide to our schools.

Scott Beddall: So, to start things off, I’ve been working in healthy schools for over 12 years now with Ministries of Heath and Education at different times. Thanks, Sam. One of the things that’s been really great to see over the last little while is an increased recognition of the importance of student wellness and safety in their broader approach to learning in K to 12. It felt like for a while it was kind of like, “Hey, we’re over here. We’ve over here. We’re trying to do some good stuff.” Now it’s built into our Ministry’s policy for student success as healthy and effective learning environments, really on sort of the idea that students need to feel safe, they need to fell well, in order to learn effectively.

Scott Beddall: Then a lot of our actual work around student safety in K to 12 has been under our erase strategy, which stands for expect, respect, and a safe education. I’ll give a little bit of history on this. Erase started back in 2012, and it really was in response to some high profile and largely incidents where bullying was quite at the center of it, and there were some pretty tragic outcomes. It I think caused our sector to just really step back and think about, “What do we do to address this issue which is fairly pervasive? And we’re going to need something that is more than a one-off, more than an out-of-the-box program. We’re going to need something that’s quite comprehensive.”

Scott Beddall: So, we launched it as a five year strategy, and there were 10 points to it. I won’t speak to each of those points in detail, but I’m kind of reflecting some of the three key categories here. One of the most important, I would say, is the people. Really trying to create a bit of a provincial infrastructure to support student safety. One of the top pieces of it was a team of provincial subject matter experts, which includes Sam and some of his colleagues from Safer Schools Together, and we were really lucky to have them in our backyard. They’re based in White Rock. They’ve got this tremendous amount of expertise in the models of violence and threat risk assessment, digital threat assessment, and so forth.

Scott Beddall: Then stemming down from them, there is a requirement for every school district to designate a safe school coordinator who would be that point lead person who would be responsible for prevention initiatives, responding to student safety incidents, et cetera. Then as part of the violence threat risk assessment model, team is a really critical piece of that. So, it’s the recognition that you need to have these multidisciplinary teams to be able to really pull together all the information you’re looking for when you’re dealing with an incident, and also to be able to provide the wraparound supports for students and families in response to those incidents. So, in the districts, the Safe School coordinator team, Safe School coordinators, sorry, interfacing with law enforcement partners, MCFD, Child and Youth Mental Health, other key agencies, which can vary depending on what the community is.

Scott Beddall: Then together, you’ve got this connected infrastructure where the districts and the schools can access the provincial subject matter leads for support, and they can access each other to share information across, and it creates a very effective way to share information and ideas. Complementing that, we’ve got then also policy piece, so every school district required to implement a Safe School code of conduct, which really outline what are the acceptable and unacceptable sort of behaviors. What is sort of the recourse when there’s a violation of that code of conduct. Also requiring a specific reference to all of the prohibited grounds for discrimination in the BC human rights code.

Scott Beddall: Then a third key element was really the capacity building. So again, through the Safer Schools Together team, training, multilevel training, from everything from insuring safe and caring schools, like how do you create positive and connected school climates, all the way up to advanced violence threat risk assessment techniques, digital threat assessment, and all the stuff that Sam’s going to dive into in a moment here. The other piece I’ll say about the training is, again, it sort of reflects that team approach. It’s designed to be taken by not just school district staff, but their community partners, so you’re all learning together with a consistent model and approach, and it sort of helps cement and support that working together after the training’s over.

Scott Beddall: Yeah. Over 18,000 people have been trained so far and growing, so it has been a really important piece of what we’re doing. Then, the resources piece, the support doesn’t end after the training’s over. So, we have a multiyear services agreement with Safer Schools Together, and part of that contract means that the school districts or the schools can contact them whenever they need to to say, “I’ve got an issue that is quite complicated. How do I deal with this? How do I walk through this?” Or maybe there’s already been an incident and I need support. It could be anything in terms of communicating with parents or media. It could be how to just walk through and insure you’ve got safety plans and supports for all the students involved. It’s been a really critical piece, I think, of our system, is to have that support in place.

Scott Beddall: Then we have a website with lots of information for educators and parents, and we also launched, I think it as back in 2013, an anonymous online reporting tool for students. Sort of reflecting what I’ve heard at different points today, as has been said in a few spaces, not everybody feels comfortable sort of putting their hands up to say that they’re concerned with something or that something’s happened to them. So, this reporting tool is on the erase site, allows them to submit a report where it automatically goes to the designated safe school coordinator for that district or school, and then they can respond quickly. The student has the option to provide their personal information, but they don’t have to.

Scott Beddall: One of the things, we think a lot of things have been really great and successful like for the five years that erase was started, but we also recognized the landscape was changing pretty substantially. Like back in 2012, some of the social media apps that are pretty prolific right now were just not happening. Some of the complicated, very complicated safety incidents that schools have to deal with can really tax their resources. Then we’ve seen a growing, and this is a good thing, recognition and discussion about mental health issues that youth are dealing with, about some of the challenges for LGBTQ students. So overall, all of this led us to look at, we need to really refresh the strategy and expand it and change the way we’re doing some things in order to properly support students the best we can.

Scott Beddall: So, over the last year we’ve been expanding erase, the first two pillars are really about the safety piece, prevention and support. But again, not such a bullying specific focus. Bullying is still in the picture, but including a lot of the other types of issues that youth and schools are facing. Then also mental health and sexual orientation and gender identity, kind of encompassing a lot of our work around student safety and wellbeing. Really, we’re really looking at the next five years to focus on, how do we increase the reach and the impact and the sustainability of the work we’re doing?

Scott Beddall: So, like we’ve been hearing here, sexual violence and sexual misconduct have been growing areas of concern for our sector as well, and we’ve been talking to our school districts and talking to our partners about, you know, what are the best ways to try and address and prevent these types of incidents, and similarly as with the work we’ve done today, looking at the need to take a comprehensive approach. So, I’m just going to talk a little bit about some of the things we’re trying to do in that area that have an impact on this.

Scott Beddall: I think one of the key pieces on our prevention piece obviously is the education component, and so we have been rolling out a new provincial curriculum for K to 12 over the last few years. Part of that includes a new physical and health education curriculum which includes a dedicated stream around social and community health. Some of the pieces around that are learning outcomes related to, how do you develop and maintain healthy relationships? How do you avoid or respond to instances of exploitation or abuse? What about discrimination and bullying and harassment and that type of thing?

Scott Beddall: Also looking at working with partners to develop learning resource to support teachers in delivering that curriculum. So, with public safety and solicitor general, working to develop a respectful futures resource which was sort of premised around some work on domestic violence, and again, building the skillsets to help students take positive and healthy approaches when they’re developing their relationships. Also looking at our sexual health education resources and building in important pieces like consent and boundaries, and some of the pieces that aren’t in your traditional sex ed type of approaches. Overall, really, I think we’re looking to build out student competencies, the knowledge and skills to help really support their success both while they’re in our system, but also as they transition out into post-secondary and into career and life in total.

Scott Beddall: Then we’re doing a lot of work around mental health, like across government. So, there’s a cross government effort to do a child and youth mental health strategy. We’ve started some work in terms of providing some supports to districts where they can move forward social emotional learning, trauma informed practice, mental health literacy, and we’re still at the very early stages of that, but there’s going to be a lot more work to come, which is great.

Scott Beddall: Another key piece is, in terms of partnerships, we’ve been working with some of our other sectors to develop some best practice, how do we work together? So, developing with public safety and solicitor general in the law enforcement sector, how can schools work together with their law enforcement partners using best practices to prevent and respond to school safety issues? So, we’ve got a draft set of provincial guidelines which we’re looking to be rolling out in the fall, and then some other guides around how school districts can work with their partners locally to develop those community multidisciplinary teams that I was referring. Again, to have that common approach to supporting students and families.

Scott Beddall: Another piece is, we have a MyEd BC student information system which captures a lot of information, and one of the things we had heard from our school districts is that sometimes there might be a student who had a fairly significant incident where there was a violence and threat risk assessment of a pretty serious nature on them. They disappear out of one district. They reappear in another district. Nobody knew anything about it, and the supports and the safety plans aren’t in place, and it’s highly concerning. So, one of the things we’re in the process of doing is adding a field into our student information system which is really a trigger for communication. It’s not intended to be labeling a student or to be gathering a whole bunch of data on students who have violence threat risk assessments.

Scott Beddall: But if a student has had a moderate to severe violent and threat risk assessment, it basically indicates that that has happened, this is the district that it originated at and the date, and it’s only accessible by some of the higher administration and Safe School coordinators so they can trigger a conversation and reach out to the originating school district Safe School coordinator and, “Could you tell me a little bit about what you had in place in terms of safety and supports for this student so we can insure some continuity here?” Obviously that has a lot of sensitivities to it in terms of respecting privacy, and so we’re going through a lot of efforts to make sure that’s done properly, and we want to avoid unintended consequence. But, to try and address that issue of where there’s a lack of information sharing that can lead to some problems down the road.

Scott Beddall: Then the last piece I’ll mention before I pass it over to Sam is just some of the work in terms of our safe school environment. So, as part of the refresh of erase, we’ve updated our anonymous reporting tool, whereas before it was, again, quite specific on bullying and violence, and now there’s a range of categories that students can report on. Everything from sexual harassment, racism, discrimination, assault, lots of different pieces. The idea is basically, we’re doing a lot of work including Safer Schools Together has rolled out a lot of information sessions to students across communities across BC to let them know about this and really to encourage that culture of, if you see something, say something. So, even if it hasn’t happened to you specifically but you’re seeing it happen to people you know, say something, and then someone can actually do something about it, is the idea.

Scott Beddall: The Kamloops-Thompson School District, you may have heard in the past year and a bit, had a couple of very high profile issues around sexual misconduct in schools involving, at least one of which, some startlingly young kids. It kind of had them step back a bit and say, “We need to take another look at how we’re addressing sexual misconduct in our schools,” so they created a cross sector task force and created some recommendations, and they’re now in the process of implementing those in terms of a whole new set of policies and procedures. It made me think of the presentation earlier today by [Myrna 00:15:04] which is we’re looking at, how do you take a compassionate and caring approach to all the people how are involved in that, and really building, like through training and capacity, the staff and other partners who are going to be working together on that piece.

Scott Beddall: So as part of that, we’re looking to work with the Office of the Ombudsperson prevention programs, and the Kamloops school district to look at, how do we take that and have that available to all of our school districts provincially? So, that’s going to be an important work in progress. Then lastly, the erase training that I mentioned and this incident support. So, Safer School Together is regularly updating their training to reflect these important issues and emerging trends, so that’s getting built into the training that we’re continuing to roll out to our school districts and partners. They’ve done some of that work also with post-secondary institutions in terms of for preservice teachers or for campus staff, and that’s been actually really great in helping to support some of the linkages between our systems.

Scott Beddall: So, I just want to put that out there that there’s always an opportunity or an invitation if you’re ever interested in terms of attending a training and checking it out, or having a discussion about what that could look like for your institution, we totally welcome that conversation. If you want to connect with your local school district to find out a bit more of that work, they’re always open to chatting about that, too. But, as I pass it over, we’re very keen to be learning from what you’re doing, sharing what we’re doing, and really looking at how we can sort of enhance and make connections between our systems to help our students sort of move along nicely. So, I’ll now pass it over to Sam and he will dazzle you with some of the details here.

Sam Jingfors: Thank you, Scott. Let’s give a hand for Hugh Grant, Scott Beddall. Fantastic, Scott, and I say that as the most endearing compliment I could possibly give you. Good afternoon, folks. In the short time that I have with you here today, I wanted to cover a little bit about just building upon what Scott had mentioned around how we currently support school districts throughout the province, public school districts, and then hoping to be able to build on that and expand around some of the linkages to the post-secondary institutions and how we can bridge some of that work that we’re doing already to support school districts over into the PSI sector. But then I wanted to also show you a couple of excerpts from, for example, our digital threat assessment training, what that tangibly looks like, knowing that many of you are working with survivors and victims of sexualized violence on campus and within communities, and what some of those technology pieces that we touch on throughout our professional level of training.

Sam Jingfors: So, in addition to the training piece that Scott mentioned, we also do work with students across the province with those information sessions around wanting to get really a lot of awareness out there around the anonymous reporting tool, how it can be utilized and accessed by students, recognizing that there are a number of barriers to reporting both of course, and not withstanding, sexualized violence, but across the whole spectrum of concerning and worrisome behaviors for students. There’s a lot of situations where they’re not going to feel comfortable coming forward, so that anonymous reporting tool is really a key piece of what that looks like. But I think, really expand …

Sam Jingfors: What we’ve tried to accomplish is really to build upon getting beyond the internet safety, don’t talk to strangers online, and really getting into a lot more tangible conversations and messaging around real challenges that our students within the K to 12 sector are facing online. That would include, for example, discussing what do you do when you receive an inappropriate message from somebody you don’t know on Instagram Direct? What are the next steps? Because that is the reality that they’re facing day-to-day. It’s not a stranger in a chatroom, for example. It is a catfishing account created on Instagram that’s been built with the intent to want to solicit sexualized photos from some of our students that are vulnerable, certainly within our community. Solicit those, and then turn them around and create that into a sextortion related incident, which we can continue to support districts that are supporting students and helping students through dealing with that, and they are very, very messy cases. So, the more amount of awareness that we can put on the forefront, I think around prevention with realistic scenarios that they’re going to through, I think the better off ultimately we will be.

Sam Jingfors: One of the unique roles I think that we’ve been able to slot into in supporting districts across BC is really being their 24/7 go-to’s for incident specific issues that they’re dealing with, from the whole spectrum of, maybe it’s an impersonation account of a teacher or an administrator, for example, that’s causing a whole bunch of mischief throughout a specific community, to the tragic end of the spectrum around an attempted or completed suicide of a young person, and supporting the district through what that trauma response looks like. But more specifically on the digital side, trying to recognize what suicide contagion could look like within that school community to identify other students that may be escalating in their own grief, or exhibiting suicidal ideation, for example, so that we can work that back into the prevention loop to get them early supports before they continue down a pathway towards a bad place.

Sam Jingfors: So, a lot of our work is very much hands-on. We have eight full-time social media threat analysts that specialize in this field to be able to map out what those peer dynamics look like, for example, for gang prevention, to be able to identify what a sociogram looks like for a negative peer group or youth gang as it develops within a community so that we can have data driven prevention efforts that are based on being able to target interventions for the leader of that group, as opposed to the followers, for example.

Sam Jingfors: So, I want to show you a couple of case examples as we go on throughout today, but the reality, when I say digital threat assessment, it really has evolved out of the realm of behavioral threat and risk assessment. So, the model that is used across 90% of Canada is one that’s called Violence Threat Risk Assessment, throughout the province of British Columbia here, at least on the K to 12 sector. Very much established across the entire province for established procedures for assessing and responding to threat making and threat related behavior. PSIs I think over the last couple of years really have recognized of course that they’ve sort of been at arms length and separate from the K12, but ensuring that continuity from K12 to PSIs, especially as it relates to the worrisome and threat related behaviors I think is especially that much more important.

Sam Jingfors: So, just the basics around behavioral threat and risk assessment. As you’re seeing, it’s really the process that allows a multidisciplinary threat assessment team to make a objective, bless you, assessment around overall levels of risk as it relates to violence potential, which is really being able to share multisector, multidisciplinary information between policing partners, school partners, MCFD, Child and Youth Mental Health, for example. But also, a big part of that, as you can imagine, over the last number of years has been social media and the internet, and we’re really saying to our threat assessment teams, they’re recognizing you can’t do an accurate threat or risk assessment without considering what the digital baseline looks like for your threat maker, because they could be saying and manifesting one way in person, but then online it shares a completely different story.

Sam Jingfors: So really, that is where the field of digital threat assessment has evolved out of, recognizing that social media and the proliferation of technology and the internet across all of our lives, and certainly our students’ lives, has really had a tremendous impact on not only the way that students communicate, but also how mischief and threat related information is shared. So, this is one of the most common digital threats that we are continuing to support law enforcement agencies and school districts throughout this province with, which is some sort of iteration of this, a Snapchat threat that is fear mongering in nature, that is insidious that says, “Don’t come to school tomorrow. Something really bad is going to happen.”

Sam Jingfors: This then gets posted out onto Snapchat, which makes its way to Instagram, and then it ends up on Facebook, and all of sudden there’s moral panic pervasive throughout the whole school community, and school administrators, chiefs of police and superintendents are having to make a decision around, “Do we shut down our school?” Out of an abundance of caution. Which, I know Kwantlen very intimately faced that exact same decision around an evacuation relating to a school threat just last month. Prior to that was Langara with a little bit of a different detail.

Sam Jingfors: But, we’re really wanting to slow that process down and make a data driven assessment to that threat there so that we’re not overreacting to the emotional component around what we continue to see across North America, particularly south of the border, which is where I live. You know, the realistic threat of a school shooting, for example, particularly for students in the United States, is something that is realistically on students’ minds as they go to school, and that should never be acceptable, I think, as a society for us, which means we have to get back to some sort of normalcy relating to responding to these types of threats, which means the vast majority of these threats are not substantiated, and we want to be able to slow that process down.

Sam Jingfors: What we really throughout the erase strategy want to continue to foster is really getting back to the basics around culture and climate and the importance of that within schools, because I think even though I’ll focus certainly on this small snippet of time that I have on nerdy tech related digital components of this work, but I don’t want us to lose site of what’s important, and I truly believe, as all of you know, that work on the front line, the importance of relationships between certainly support staff, adults in general, and students, is one of the most profound prevention techniques that we have on our side. Because when we continue to look at the research around, from the FBI and the Secret Service around, is there a profile for a school shooter? Which of course there isn’t, but there are a number of common characteristics that are in play for each of them. One of them that always stands out to be profoundly insightful is each of those school killers lacked a healthy attachment to a positive adult role model in their life. They didn’t have anyone in their corner continuing to encourage them to get back up and to be resilient. So, that relationship piece can’t be overlooked within schools.

Sam Jingfors: But just to be able to speak to a couple of those … We’re going to have questions at the end, if you don’t mind. Thank you. A couple of those data driven pieces around digital threat assessment. If this lands on the desk of a law enforcement officer or one of our school staff members, certainly elevating it up and getting police involved is going to be important, but wanting to make a data driven assessment to this. One of those data driven assessment pieces that we talk about in digital threat assessment is really questioning that image and the authenticity and the credibility of that image, and conducting … Well, asking, really, is that a real gun or is that a fake gun? Or in other words, is this a unique image, I.e. an actual gun that is at home of the threat maker that they just took a picture of, or is this a stock image, one that’s been sourced from the internet, downloaded from another area of the internet? There’s a very easy, credible way that we can test that, and how we do that is through a technique called a reverse image search.

Sam Jingfors: So, we crop and isolate that image, and then instead of going to Google and searching for TEC-9 or Uzi guns, we are taking that image, isolating it, cropping it, and then running it as a reverse image search by saying, “Hey, Google, have you ever seen this image, and if so, where? Show us exactly where if any you’ve seen this exact imagine.” Which of course the results for this image gives us 289 results, indicating and giving us confirmation that it is in fact a stock image, with pages that include matching images telling us that exact image has been matched on all these other websites. So, it’s confirmation that it is in fact a stock image, which reduces the level of risk, at least initially. Police are still responding accordingly and being able to search the residence of the threat maker for access to the means, because that’s a key variable, of course, as it relates to threat making behavior is, “Does the threat maker possess access to the means to carry out that threat?”

Sam Jingfors: But, this at least gives us a very quick determination for law enforcement to be able to know they’re not dealing, for example, with that exact gun at home, for example. It doesn’t mean there isn’t other access to the means. But, we can also use that technique for a whole variety of different images to determine whether they’re stock or unique. So, if you’re working with a young person exhibiting suicidal ideation or self harming behaviors, to be able to credibly test the validity of that image by conducting a reverse image search is an option that’s available to us as well, which of course we find out in this case that it is in fact a stock image, that there’s four other results after searching almost 35 billion images that are openly and publicly available.

Sam Jingfors: We do, though, want to be able to pick up on whether it has been tweaked at all. As you can see, what if a caption is now drawn over top of that self harming cuts on an arm, for example? Does that change the results? Which in this case, it doesn’t. It still says the original is a stock image and it was sourced from the internet. But if you compare the two results that are there, the one on the bottom, that’s the original image with self harm cuts on a wrist, but at the top, the one that we uploaded, has a caption over top in the middle. So, our hypotheses would be originally it was a stock image, and now it’s now unique, drawn with a caption over top of it.

Sam Jingfors: So, I’ve selected a couple of key pieces that I wanted to touch base on recognizing what the mission of this forum is. Especially for those of you working with survivors or those fleeing sexualized violence, for example, there are a number of technology components that I think we certainly want to be aware of. I think one of the foundational ones is with the very sophisticated devices that we all have in our hands, there are a number of geolocational components that are integral to its operation. But of course, with those come a number of risks when it comes to supporting those that are fleeing violence. So, I wanted to touch on a couple of those, and then probably on a couple of protective steps as well.

Sam Jingfors: So, for those of us that have Apple devices, for example, key feature to be able to source the actual location of where that device is is to be able to utilize Find My iPhone, for example. So, if you have passwords to be able to get into iCloud, you can easily see, provided that feature’s turned on, which it is for 98% of the Apple devices that are out there, where exactly that device is on a map right now, for example, which of course is valuable if you lose or your gets stolen, for example, to be able to remotely erase that device if needed from there. But be mindful that, as it’s still connected to the network, you can at least see where it last was on a map.

Sam Jingfors: We also talk, certainly on the investigative side working with police, but also responding to school safety issues, the importance of metadata on photographs, for example. The reality is, every single one of us that take photos on our smartphone, it embeds an ocean of data below the surface of each of those photos. Really how much information, as in everything or really nothing, is all based on one light switch feature within our settings, which is geolocation as it relates to our camera. But a couple of rules to remember about metadata specifically is social media platforms strip metadata off of photos, and we’d expect that as a user of that platform. You wouldn’t want me to be able to go to your Facebook page, right click save as on your family photo, and then view exactly the geolocation of where your house of where you uploaded that photo from. We’d expect that as a user, right? So, anything that passes through social media, whether it be Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, there’s no inherent metadata that we can access from the outside.

Sam Jingfors: Having said that, we’ve identified a couple of ways where you can access metadata. One is if you have access to the device itself, you can look at the metadata below the surface as all of you can on your device. But, we’ve also identified three different transmission methods by which metadata doesn’t inherently get stripped off, and that’s if photos are texted, emailed, or airdropped. Texted, emailed or airdropped it doesn’t get compressed and metadata is still viewable below the surface, provided that feature is on, which it is for the vast majority of us. So, I took this photo here. One of our other initiatives that Scott mentioned is gang reduction through informed practice, which is a multiyear strategy with the PSSG, Public Safety and Solicitor General.

Sam Jingfors: So, I took this photo at their media announcement, and when we look at the metadata below the surface of that photo, this is how much we can see about that one particular photo and the device that it was taken on. So, we can see the exact device, Apple iPhone 8+. So, it wasn’t a Samsung Galaxy, it wasn’t an iPad, it wasn’t an SLR camera. It was taken with the back camera, not the front. It wasn’t a selfie. The flash didn’t fire. It was taken March 12th at 11:33 in the morning, and 50 seconds. The latitude and the longitude is there, as well as the altitude and the camera direction, pointing northwest. So, we can plot those exact coordinates on a map down to specifically within what area of the building that photo was taken. That is the inherent ability to be able to plot and view metadata on photos, which means we really, for those of you that work with victims and survivors fleeing violence, this is going to be a key factor around protecting their safety, to be able to turn this feature off and have that data not inherently put on every single photo that’s there.

Sam Jingfors: We also, because we have GPS built in there, we also have an approximate speed that’s embedded on the photo as well. So, you can imagine where we’ve used this investigatively working with police agencies when they’ve had distracted driving causing death investigations, for example, where someone’s driving down the highway and they take photos of the beautiful mountains outside. Not paying attention to the road in front of them, they veer onto the shoulder and run over a cyclist that’s out for their morning cycle, tragically killing them. They’re trying to figure out whether they can leverage an aggravated charge relating to speed. There was really no way to be able to prove it other than the metadata of the five photos that were taken prior to that accident.

Sam Jingfors: Another very quick example, as well. Think about how many times we post something for sale on Craigslist or on Facebook buy and sell, for example. The good news is, metadata is stripped off at the source, at Facebook, right? But, think where a lot of those conversations lead into. Typically text message or email, right? “Text me what time I can come pick this up. Send me the address. Oh, by the way, could you take a couple of larger photos? I can’t really see if there’s a scratch on the side of that TV,” motorcycle, whatever it is. “Yeah, sure.” Take, take, send, send. So, you’ve left the safe haven of Facebook or Craigslist that would strip it, and you’ve now entered into a vulnerable discourse which is text message. So, now that means the recipient, if they were smart and knew where to look, they’d be able to say, “Oh, I don’t feel like actually purchasing this and paying for it. Why don’t I just wait until you go to work and break in and steal it?” Yikes. So, are you paranoid yet?

Sam Jingfors: How about I’ll start with this. A proactive way to be able to turn that one feature off. That’s your homework, to go into your settings on your iPhone, for example, go into privacy, go to location services and go to your camera and turn location off as it relates to never. It’s either never or while using. While using means every single photo you take embeds that amount of data below the surface. Same thing with Android. If you go to your camera as if you’re about to take a picture, you go to the settings wheel and look at all the settings that pop up and turn off location tags.

Sam Jingfors: Very quickly, as well. I mean, we could also play the game of how much your smartphone knows about you, because there’s actually another additional feature within the iPhone, for example, that tracks where you frequently travel throughout a community so as to give you real time informed suggestions on travel time, for example. Right? You’ll find that by digging even deeper below the surface, by going privacy, location services. Also, by the way, while you’re there I’d stop in and take a peek into microphone and see which apps actually have access to your microphone. I would argue Candy Crush doesn’t need access to your microphone. Do they want it? Absolutely. They want to be able to say that in Richmond here there’s 700 people that are playing Candy Crush right now, it’s almost lunchtime, let’s target them with an advertisement for a pizza shop that’s down the street, for example. That’s how they can use informed data to be able to target targeted marketing and advertising.

Sam Jingfors: But, it also means that, if you’re taking to your friend about Lululemon shorts that they should buy, for example, because you swear by them, it means likely when they’re scrolling through Instagram later, they might see a targeted advertisement for those exact Lululemon shorts. So, go into microphone and make sure … You only need to allow the apps that actually credibly need access to your location. Or your microphone, pardon me. Below that, if you go all the way down to the bottom of all of your apps and take a look at system services, then look at what’s called significant locations. It used to be called frequent locations, which is why I show you this. It’s the same data. Once you click on that, it will show you where you frequently have traveled throughout your community. Please promise me that you’ll use these powers for good and not for evil. What I mean by that specifically is when you go home and say hello to your significant other, please don’t say, “My phone died on the way home. Can I borrow yours for a second?” Then you go in there and look for dinner table conversation topics. Because it has the degree of detail down to the minute of where you specifically were at various locations.

Sam Jingfors: So, let’s think back to our work supporting those that are fleeing violence. This is going to be a key factor. Now, what has countered this has been biometric scanning, like not just having a password to be able to enter a phone, but using your fingerprint and using face ID to open a phone has really curbed a lot of the concerns relating to this. But still, to be able to know where location tracking is actually stored locally within the phone is going to be important.

Sam Jingfors: There’s also Google location history. Google has a lot of information about all of us, of course. But if you go to myactivity.google.com, for example, it should show you every single Google search you’ve ever done. Yikes. Maybe that’s too much info. But it also means, again, back to our work, if you’re logged in in two different computers or on two different devices, you can access this data around what was searched, but also location history of where you’ve used Google Maps to be able to travel from point A to point B, for example. Which of course can be highly revealing in terms of where you are at that exact moment.

Sam Jingfors :So, jumping now to the two most popular platforms that our K to 12 students, and I would say beyond that into PSI age students into young adults, is going to be Instagram and Snapchat, number one and number two, and they go back and forth in terms of popularity. A key piece for us working with schools is certainly to understand what some of the key factors around Instagram, especially as it relates to child exploitation. Some of the factors that go along with the pervasiveness of sexting and sextortion related cases. An acknowledgement, first of all, that it’s not uncommon for our students to have several different Instagram accounts to their name. Right? They’ll have their main account, but then they’ll have their spam account or their secondary account or multiple other ones where maybe it doesn’t meet the threshold for perceived popularity, which there’s a lot of drama and expectations and pressure around Instagram.

Sam Jingfors: They’ve been tricked into thinking the more people following you comparative to the number of people you’re following is more important, so you need to have higher, higher numbers. But because of that, if you’re trying to find their other alias accounts, for example, you can also click on the followers list of their main account, because quite often they will follow themselves because it is a boost in numbers. So, trying to understand, for example, getting back to establishing a digital baseline of a threat maker, we’re wanting to locate other accounts that they’ve been using to establish a digital baseline.

Sam Jingfors: I pulled a couple of examples of sexualized exploitation, for example, of young people, where this young person was actually selling sexting related photos through Instagram stories, as you can see, and I’m highly concerned just looking at this as you are around the risk of sexualized targeted violence and child exploitation relating to a young person actually going out of their way to sell their own explicit photos, for example.

Sam Jingfors: We always ask students, “Hey, is this catfishing?” They laugh, and of course they say no, because they know catfishing to be this, to be a fake account that was created on Instagram, for example. So, here’s a real life case file from here in British Columbia of a Instagram profile as you’re seeing here that was able to message over 150 young girls between the ages of 10, 11, and 12, all within three specific neighboring communities using various child grooming narratives around, “I just moved into the town next to you,” for example. “Do you want to be friends?” Et cetera. All of that communication, by the way, was happening through Instagram Direct, which again, for those of you working with clients for example, or even have kids of your own, recognize that Instagram is a photo sharing application, but the majority of youth communication is happening through a private message mailbox called Instagram Direct, one to one communication.

Sam Jingfors: So again, on the prevention the side, the more information I think we can give our kids at a younger age around the risks involved in sending explicit or inappropriate photos of your self and how, of course, it comes back to bite you later on, and you don’t have a second chance to change your mind. All of the factors and key messaging that is part of the messaging that we do with the student sessions throughout the province, really trying to make sure that instead of, “No, no, no. Don’t do it.” Just make an informed decision before you do it. So, we have some curriculum and slides that we built that we’re happy to share with any of you that can empower someone within your team to be able to really try and get this awareness out there as it relates to trying to prevent sexualized child exploitation, for example.

Sam Jingfors: Snapchat. Right? So, this little ghost here, again, came out in 2011 with the promise that you could send a photo and have it disappear on the recipient’s end in 10 seconds or less, so that galvanized certainly the way that youth communicate, and it continues to be the way that students will communicate one to one to each other. So, just a couple of pieces around that, because I want to talk about how you can use this to be able to harness public safety related information and support those fleeing violence. Once you take a photo, you can choose whether to send this to one or all of your contacts, in which case you can set the timer for one to ten seconds for how long it can be viewed on the recipient’s end, and then you hit send. It pops up on their side, sits there like an unread email until you open it. Once you open it, that’s when the timer starts, one to ten seconds. Or you can choose to add this to your story. Your story is kind of like a highlight reel of your day, and it’s viewable for 24 hours after you’ve posted it. So, everything about the app is ephemeral. It’s short lasting. It’s not meant to be permanent, as opposed to some of the other social media platforms.

Sam Jingfors: This is Theresa Campbell, the president of our company, her daughter. This is her stats on the number of photos that she has sent and received since she has downloaded Snapchat. So, that gives you an idea really around the volume of communication that’s being sent back and forth, because it’s not highly curated photos, right? I think the paradigm shift with Snapchat was all of us in this room used to use cameras to take photos of things that mattered, right? We’d get everyone together and we’d say, “Okay, pose, and Bryan, don’t yawn this time, and here we go.” Right? But our kids are walking down the hallways of our schools taking photos of their feet, for example, writing a message across the middle and hitting send. So, it’s not highly curated, and Snapchat really has made communication, I think, a lot more vivid and a lot more fun for our students.