Children and young people communicating via the Internet and mobile phones may place themselves at risk and be vulnerable to abuse by predators without even knowing it.

It is up to parents and other caregivers to warn them and install some control measures to protect them.

Internet safe or sorry?

The Internet is a great way to stay up-to-date on the news, do research for school projects and communicate with friends. However, dangers such as “sexting” (sending inappropriate text messages or photographs), cyber bullying and chatting with predators are very real dangers lurking in the technology our children use.

Amichai Shulman, CTO of network security firm Imperva (and a parent of four children), points out the obvious when he remarks that if adults are proven to be vulnerable to cyber-attacks we cannot expect children to be any better; “especially given that their sense of curiosity is far more developed and their sense of caution far less mature”.

It is therefore up to parents and other caregivers to warn children and install some safety programs to protect them.

How to keep your child safe while online

    • The best parental controls are active and informed parents who teach their kids about the dangers of new technologies and who are aware of what their kids are up to. Don’t hand over any Internet connected device before you know yourself how it works.
    • Before getting your child WiFi capable electronic devices, be sure that you know how to turn on any available parental controls. Parental control software is built into the latest version of Mac OS X and Windows, but can also be purchased as separate programs, which often offer more features and more flexibility. These include programs such as Bsafe Online, Net Nanny and Safe Eyes.
    • Lesson number one should always be to know that: Once you’ve written something you can’t delete it.
    • Put password protection on the computer, so that you have to log your children on when they want to use the Internet. Also, help them create their own, sensible, passwords. For example, long sentences are easy for them to remember and hard for others to crack. Explain why they should use different passwords for different accounts.
    • Use parental control software to restrict access to the computer and Internet to times when a parent is around to supervise what the children are doing.
    • If you use a router to share Internet access through the house, set it up to restrict access to when a parent is home to supervise, or use your router to set up specific Internet application and gaming access to different computers or Internet-ready gaming systems.
    • Set strong privacy settings if your child uses Facebook or other social media networks, and limit their friends list to people who they know personally. Include yourself on the friends list so that you can monitor the conversations closely.
    • Position the screen and other devices that have Internet access in clear view, so that you can supervise what your children are doing.
    • Ask your Internet service provider (ISP) about additional filtering software that may be available to you.
    • Be aware that without parental controls, children can hide their tracks by clearing private data from the Internet browser they are using, including the browsing history, cache and cookies.
    • Review what kind of access to the Internet your children will have when visiting friends and family members.
    • Spying on your children is very rarely a good idea, but if you use “parental control”, you should actually let your child know that you might be reading some of his or her texts or emails as a condition to having access to the Internet.
    • Make sure their computers have antivirus software and do scan their devices regularly for malware.

 

Sources

How do I keep my children safe online? Retrieved from: http://www.theguardian.com
Preparing for Internet Safety. Retrieved from: http://www.stopitnow.org

 

Revised by M van Os