Dr Rachel O’Connell

Dr Rachel O’Connell, founder & CEO of TrustElevate, which provides secure authentication and authorisation for under 16 year olds. Dr O'Connell is one of the preeminent authorities on electronic identification and age verification and is the author of a technical standard entitled PAS 1296 Age Checking code of practice, which published by the British Standards Institution on March 8 2018. Rachel was the fifth person to join the start-up social networking platform, Bebo, and was instrumental in operationally building the business, which was acquired by AOL in 2008 for $850M. Before joining Bebo, Rachel led a series of highly successful large-scale Pan-European projects, which involved managing teams located in 19 countries across Europe. In 2000, Rachel set up the Cyberspace Research Unit, at the University of Central Lancashire and secured funding from the European Commission to establish and operate the first UK Internet Safety Centre (2000- 2006). Rachel’s PhD examined the implications of online paedophile activity for investigative strategies