Secure Family Technologies: More than keep in touch with friends
Social Networking Sites
Websites such as MySpace, Facebook, etc., are popular online places where kids express themselves, keep in touch with friends, and post personal profiles describing who they are and their interests. Online social networking is extremely popular among teenagers and parents must become aware of the risks.
Potential risks:
- Internet predators use social networking cites to contact and establish relationships with children.
- Many social networking sites encourage kids to compete to see who has the greatest number of contacts. Kids will add new members to their lists even if they don’t know them in person.
- Users may pose as someone else — a different person or person of a different age — without others knowing. Such users have taken advantage of this and social-networking profiles to entice or sexually exploit kids.
- Kids often post too much personal information about themselves in social networking cites.
- Urge kids to restrict access to their profiles so only those on their contact lists are able to view them.
- Encourage them to choose gender-neutral screen names or nicknames — such as their initials or a word. Make sure the name doesn’t include information revealing their identity or location.
- Remind kids to use the privacy settings on social-networking sites to restrict access to their “spaces” or blogs to only people they know in person.
- Know who your kids are communicating with online.
- Insist your kids never give out personal information or arrange to meet in person with someone they’ve met online.
Parents need to search social networks for their children!
Computer savvy parents can do this on their own, but this might take a little work for parents that do not know the computer that well. Most social networking sites have a search feature to allow you to search for things on their site. The problem is that there are literally hundreds of social networking sites and new ones are popping up everyday.
Secure Family Technologies, bridges the gap between parents lack of knowledge of the Internet and your teens life online. Our monitoring software searches hundreds of social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook, etc.to help you make sure that no personal information is posted online about your teens, either by them or someone posing as them.
