Joseph Carter,
Sun City Security Services,
MSIT Information
Assurance and Security
[email protected]
Monitoring child safety on the Internet is a responsibility of every parent. Predators are everywhere on the Internet and parents need to understand that these predators have no conscience. Check with your local police department and find how many of these predators they monitor on a daily basis. Also, not just predators look for information that our children put on the Internet, but employers, colleges and universities and organizations monitor this information as well.
Some parents will allow their children to have free access to the Internet without monitoring what they are doing, the sites they are visiting, and who they are corresponding with. With young children, this is especially important. Setting your child up with their own account and adding age appropriate restrictions as to what they are capable of viewing on the Internet is the parent’s responsibility.
Many of these predators know exactly what children are looking for and will set up web pages to lure children into their sites and gather information from them. A parent feels bad when they get scammed by some trickery; it is even easier on the Internet for children to fall for this same trickery. I’ve tried to explain to people to make sure they thoroughly look at the information on a site. I’ve had porn show up on a site that looked like it should have been a Hewlett-Packard site for printer drivers.
Set them up with their own account and put age-restricted content filters on their accounts. Go to the control panel on a Windows operating system computer and go to user accounts.
The parents need to be set up as an administrator with a password and then create the non-administrator account for their children. Limit the time the children are allowed to be on the computer. Do not allow children to use any distinguishing names for accounts such as their own name, names with numbers in them
that have addresses, birth dates, or phone numbers in them. These are things that predators look for.
Also, third party cookies should be turned off on children and adult accounts. This can be done in Internet options on your Internet Explorer based computers.
Open Internet Options, go to the Privacy tab, click on Advanced and it will allow you to change what “Cookies” are accepted, blocked, or you will be prompted
for. Usually, first-party Cookies should present little concern.
Most importantly, put the computer the children have access to in a room where it can be monitored, not the child’s bedroom. Many children that are in their teens decide that they need freedom and privacy. They may have to do research for school work. Then they want to set up Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter accounts, and even sexting (watch those cellular phones)!
Here comes the real danger! Teens are full of drama and think everyone needs to know what they are doing and what they are up to.
As I have expressed to my own daughter, not everyone needs to know what you are doing. A lot of our personal life needs to remain that way, personal! If you allow them to have these accounts, make sure you have access to these accounts as well.
The general rule of thumb for me to my daughter was and is; if you don’t want me, your principal, your grandparents, a university, or a future employer to know
about it, don’t put it on these sites. Just because you erase it off of Facebook or MySpace does not mean that it is not floating out in cyberspace for eternity.
As for Twitter accounts and Tweeting, it should be understood that Twitter uses metadata. The scary part of metadata on Twitter is it leaves a virtual footprint of
every place a tweet occurs. This is the longitude and latitude of where the tweets were sent. With the right software a predator can follow you or your child and gain information as to where they are, at that given moment.
Be vigilant with your children when it comes to the Internet. Although it is a powerful tool for information, this same information can be used by predators for the purposes they choose to exploit. It is our responsibility to monitor what they are doing.
For more safety tips and information you can visit the FBI and NIST web sites.
