| Thursday, July 21, 2005 |
| Keeping Kids Safe Online |
ICRA Kid's Page - tips for kids to follow and parents to know.
ICRA Family Contract - please check this out. It will help open the lines to honest communication about who and what you find online.
Microsoft's Computer Slang Primer - understand 1337 - speak (short, and slang for "elite-speak"). Understand what your younger teen is saying.
Free Trials of Parental Control and Monitoring Software - on our downloads page.
AOL Keyword: Parental Controls - if you use AOL you have good parental parental controls available to you, but you must keep your master password secure.
Yahooligans - This is a site made for kids.
Our Notes:
Yahoo closes user-created chat rooms. Not just the ones for teens either - all of them. This is a result of pressure from advertisers, upset because they thought their ads were being displayed on educational areas of Yahoo. There's also a lawsuit pending. Yahoo has long been criticized (including by us in the previous child-safety show) for its failure to ban such rooms.
Chat rooms on AOL and Yahoo, and everywhere, are still affected by "porn spam bots." These are not people, but programs (robots) written to act like real people that trick you into clicking a link that will take you to porn sites, illegal software (warez) sites, or other dangerous sites. Why do people do this, and why do they target teens? Teens are more likely to be curious and fall for the trick, and the sites make money for eve ry person that visits them. (Yes, it's mostly about money.) Can you avoid this? Not really, so be sure to never follow links from chat rooms.
Also, AOL is possibly worse than Yahoo, because when you enter an AOL chat room you're revealing your email address and screen name as well. Bots take these screen names and email address and add them to their lists of known-working addresses, and within days of entering an AOL chat room, a screen name that previous didn't get much spam will be getting not only email spam, but instant messages that link to porn sites as well.
The latter (receiving porn-spam instant messages after entering a chat room) happens on Yahoo too, but Yahoo's latest Messenger, beta 7, is working to filter these out.
Bottom line - what to do?
One simple solution is - don't go into chat rooms. However, if that's not an option make sure you never click links in chat rooms. Be very skeptical of IMs, or go the extra-step and block anyone not on your buddy list.
Setup a special chat-only screen name and profile for AOL and Yahoo. Don't use your birth-year or graduation year in your screen name, or profile. Teens can add 20 years to their profile's age, and girls should consider listing themselves as guys. All these help reduce the likelihood someone will target you. On AOL, using a separate screen name just for chat will also keep out a lot of spam from your regular screen name.
Parents - don't be intimidated if your child knows more about the internet than you do. You don't have to know it all, but get to know the things that count.
Get to know your child's online friends just like you would get to know their offline friends. Establish safe rules regarding online friends, including never meet anyone from the internet without a parent, and always in a public place. Ask questions about online relationships.
Get to know the slang, so that when you do monitor chatting, you can understand the conversation. Be on the lookout for codewords being used to say "parents are here," which may mean their hiding something from you, or may just be them wanting some privacy.
Like listening in on phone conversations, monitoring internet chats may be considered a breach of trust and may be met with some resistance, so get creative!
Put any computer with an internet connection in the family room.
Web cams are used to verify that the person they're talking to is real (because pictures are easily faked), but they can also be used for sexual activity online, so monitor their use as well. They're as cheap as $30 now, and some even look like large-sized writing pens.
Ask you teens if they have 'blogs' or journals online where they may be sharing personal information with others. They're cool things, but teens are possibly sharing too much personal info. |
posted by The Knowles Family @ 6:29 PM   |
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