What Is a Gaggle Safety Audit?

A Safety Audit, performed by Gaggle and exclusive to your school or district, provides a retrospective analysis of content and review of possible incidents Gaggle’s services would have caught, had you been a subscriber at the time.

Through this comprehensive report of past content, your school and district administrators are able to see exactly what kinds of potentially harmful content your students are sharing across your online collaboration platforms, such as Google’s G Suite for Education, Microsoft Office 365, and Canvas.

In order to initiate a Safety Audit, a school must first complete a survey, giving Gaggle access to certain information and records to begin the review process. Gaggle’s machine-learning algorithm and a team of trained safety experts then look back one to three months in your school’s digital system, scanning through emails, attachments, online or shared documents, and links within any of these mediums in order to filter out harmful content students have shared.

Actionable items are student-created content that would have triggered an immediate response from Gaggle. There are three types of actionable items:

• Violations are items for which student warnings could have been issued, including profanity, insults, and provocative (but not pornographic) imagery.
• Questionable content (QCON) are items that give cause for concern and need to be brought to the attention of an administrator but do not represent an immediate threat to a student or others. These include cyberbullying, references to suicide and self-harm without evidence of an imminent threat, professional pornography, and graphic, violent, or sexual stories.
• Possible student situations (PSS) are items that reveal an imminent threat to the student or others, including violence, suicide, pornography, or harmful family situations. With Gaggle’s actual service, these items are blocked and lead to an immediate contact to a school administrator 24/7

From June 2018 - June 2019, Gaggle performed 80 Safety Audits, scanning through over 5 million items from different schools and districts. Of these items, Gaggle found 183,700 actionable items, which would have led to an immediate response by Gaggle if caught in real-time. To learn more about the benefits of a Safety Audit, visit Why Should You Get a Safety Audit?