Protect Your Child Online

So far we have covered online predation as a serious threat to our children’s safety online. Many cases or incidents have been documented worldwide involving children being sexually exploited by online predators. But protecting your child online does not only involve protecting them from sexual abuses by online offenders. There are many risks that lurk out there waiting to victimize our children.

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Parents should take the responsibility of protecting their own children from the dangers online. But the problem is, especially for parents who are not tech savvy, how do we start? 

Let’s face it. For many parents who spent a great part of their teenage years in the 70’s or 80’s or even the 90’s, today’s technology can be really daunting. Because they get caught up with “a lot of things” they failed to keep up with what’s new and what’s up with their kids. 

So how do parents start to become tech savvy? 

• Don’t be afraid to ask your kids to teach you how to use the Internet. Ask them to teach you how to text message as well. This gives our children a sense of responsibility and leadership and opens up a dialogue between you and them. Perhaps the best way to keep up with our children’s knowledge is to do online activities with them. Create your own email or social networking site accounts like Friendster and MySpace.
• Spend at least an hour a day online. Familiarize yourself with the latest trends that are going on on the Internet. In fact, become a blogger. Blogging is a great way to expand your knowledge about the Internet.
• Familiarize yourself with the many ways you could search for something or someone online. Social networking sites allow users to search for a specific profile of a person. Say, for example, you can key in a person’s gender, age and location on appropriate search boxes and a page will return relevant results of registered users who match the profile you are searching for.
• Read about news and updates about the ways predators use to victimize children. There are tons of information and news sources that cite events and cases involving online predation that could give you general insights on how these predators work.

After you’ve familiarized your way around the Internet and after accumulating enough relevant information about the dangers online, you can now effectively educate your children and help them better understand how best to use the Internet.

Our home. Sanctuary to the dangers that lurk outside. Our home is the best place where we hope our children could stay safe, protected from strangers and other bad elements that lie waiting outside the safe barriers of our homes. But is our home still as safe as we hoped it is? Read the rest of this entry »

There is now a deluge of information available on the Internet and there is a vast and enormous potential of things that can be done online. Millions of people exchange tons of information everyday almost effortlessly instantaneously. These information cover just about everything and they are published without being censored and without being regulated. The lack of appropriate regulations has led to the proliferation of not only sites with erroneous data, but most disturbingly, of sites that present serious threats to our children’s safety. That is why the need for protecting your child online is now pressing more than ever. 

However, the exponential growth of these dangerous information and malicious websites that endanger our children’s safety is not the only concern that needs to be addressed. Today, as computer chips have made it possible for computer hardware to shrink and as wireless technology has made the accessibility of information more ubiquitous, online threats has become increasingly stubborn to curb. 

Today, cell phones with 3G or wifi connectivity and Internet browsers made Internet access more instantaneous. This now poses an even greater problem to our children’s safety as we can no longer monitor their Internet activities whenever they are out of sight. Innovations such as camera phones could be used by people these days to instantly share photos through multimedia messaging services available in many phone networks around the globe that allow people to send photos from their phone to anyone with cell phones connected to a supporting network or to any email address. This is one problem to look at as there were reports that this innovation is already being harnessed by online predators.

Another problem that threatens our children’s safety brought by the advent of cell phones is that cell numbers on children’s profiles on social networking sites can often be used by online predators. They could use these numbers to send text messages that invite them to meet up with them offline leading to actual exploitations. 

Parents should be aware of the many innovations these days that allow people to harness the power of the Internet instantaneously. We should all focus our attention not only on our children’s Internet activities at home but as well as elsewhere because the dangers online can now reach our children in a number of ways.

The Internet is not altogether bad. In fact, it’s one of the best inventions that have made some aspects of our modern lives better, especially in the field of communications. Communicating with people around the world has never been more convenient and instant: we can send electronic messages to people from different parts of the globe at lightning speeds. Unfortunately, like everything else that were initially good, the Internet is now tarnished by illegal activities by people with malicious intent, often targeting unsuspecting children. Read the rest of this entry »

The Internet is here to stay. Although there is a plan to scrap it and build a new one, running a parallel network alongside the existing one to make the transition gradual, nevertheless it still continues to evolve with thousands of new sites appearing everyday and with thousands of new personal profiles added to social networking sites such as Facebook, Friendster and MySpace, the three being the most common with millions of users worldwide. 

Social networking sites. What are they exactly, anyway? 

Social networking sites allow users to create their personal profiles, upload their pictures and invite friends who are users themselves to their network, thus creating a “social network of friends.” For some becoming a part of one or all of these networking sites has become quite a craze to the point of becoming addicted to the system, accumulating friends within the network by the hundreds, even thousands. 

But parents and users should be wary about the potential dangers of social networking sites. While at the outset the creators of these sites have no intention of endangering anyone, like almost everything else, these sites have become tools for offenders to victimize unsuspecting users, especially children. According to Wired News 700 sex offenders from 46 states had profiles on MySpace using their real names and 497 of these had been convicted of crimes involving children. There was also this terrifying story of online predator who used MySpace to lure a 16-year old girl from the suburbs to meet him in the

Networking sites can also be used to target specific user profiles, thus making a way for predators to narrow down his target to specific demographics. For example, a predator could key in a profile of someone from

Given these information about the dangers of networking sites, find a way to participate in your child’s online networking activities. Become part of his or her network by creating your own online profile first using any of these networking sites. Who knows? By doing it you could find a lot more about your kid’s stuff online.

Experts and researchers are now finding ways to improve online security in hopes of limiting illegal activities on the Internet if not wiping them out entirely. Perhaps what they ultimately have in mind is protecting your child online as each child is more susceptible and easily fall victim to unscrupulous online sites. At present, workarounds are in place but are unfortunately not sufficient as online predators are finding ways to make these workarounds obsolete, perpetuating their evil ways even more, victimizing more unsuspecting children.

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To us, nothing is more important that providing for our children’s needs and ensuring their safety. However, ensuring their safety is an issue that has recently increased in importance as now we are not only looking after their safety offline, but we are now also looking after their safety online. The latter is not as easy as, say, holding their hands tightly as we cross the street. Protecting your child online ain’t a walk in the park!

What are the ways to protect your child online?

Be informed. I can’t stress this enough. Track your child’s online activities. Perhaps the best way to subtly do this if you’re overly concerned about not wanting your child to feel you are being too intrusive is not to put the computer in his room.

Become Internet savvy yourself. Familiarize yourself with the most common social networking sites like MySpace and Friendster where you can easily find out who your child is networking with. By becoming familiar with the common networking sites you would find out what type of friends your child is hanging out with online. You can also try searching for your child’s name on Google. It’s amazing how search engines give you a hint of what someone is up to online. I was surprised to find out that Google recently turned in 1,120 results for my name.

Become your child’s confidant. Make him feel comfortable with you. That way he’ll share with you what he’s been doing online lately. Try to find out from him as much as you can what sort of activities he’s involved with online. In fact, it would be a lot of fun if you could get him to do his favorite online activities with you.

Educate your child. Maintain an open line of communication between you and your child and discuss the dangers of inappropriate websites. Tell him stories about people who were endangered by online predators.

Use software. There’s a lot of reliable software around that would help you monitor your child’s online activities. Google them out or check out your nearest computer shop.

Although it could be a stretch to try to find out all about our children’s online activities, the benefit far outweighs the dangers it could cause by not keeping ourselves abreast with the times.

The dangers online involving children are alarmingly widespread. According to the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), there had been a four-fold increase in serious sexual child abuse on the web. It has risen 34 percent compared to last year’s figures. That is indeed a hideously alarming number that calls for immediate action and the more reason to protect your child online now more than ever.

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Protecting your child online is now a growing concern that involves not only the right government agency or software companies, but above all, the parents. It’s been 10 years since the first time I used the Internet. Back then the only thing that interests me whenever I go online was the homepage of The Beatles’ Anthology collection. There were no networking sites then. Not much “inappropriate sites” that contain explicit sexual themes. After two years or so, I started to come across chilling online news about sexual abuses on children. The Internet has then become much like the offline world.

Over the years, illegal and dangerous websites have spawned exponentially over the Internet at a staggering rate and it’s now getting out of hand. Some people these days find it hard to distinguish if the landing page is relevant to their query or not or if the specific site is authoritative or scam. A lot of children fall victim to these scam sites after numerous haphazard clicks on links. They have become easy prey to deceitful online schemes.

Having said all the sad facts about children being victimized by unscrupulous online sites, do you think it’s time to scrap the current infrastructure of the Internet and build a new one?