Helping your child stay safe online

Following recent events, The Diary thought it might be useful to give parents some help and advice regarding internet safety for their children. The following guidelines and tips were prepared by Carolin Collins of In-Tandem Web Design. Many thanks Carolin.

Some Basic Guidelines

Become web-savvy yourself! You have to understand the social media environment yourself before you can successfully help to educate your child in Internet safety. In today’s world, you simply need to be a step ahead wherever possible.

Only allow your child access to a computer in a high traffic area in your house.

Know who your child is connecting with online. It’s a good idea to ask your child to go through their online contacts with you every few months. Ask them to explain exactly how they know every single person they are linked up with and ensure that they stick to the “one degree of separation” rule.

Educate your child about the importance of safe passwords, that they should not use the same password for all of their online activity and first and foremost should never share their password with anybody.

Continually dialogue with your child about online safety.

FACEBOOK

There are many positive sides to Facebook and if used properly and safely, it can be a fantastic resource for staying in touch with friends who live far away, being entertained, organising social events and doing educational and work-related research. However, the key here is “used properly and safely”.

Guidelines

If you don’t have your own Facebook account, open one. You don’t need to link up with lots of people or even put up any personal information yourself. But “friend” your child so that you can keep an eye on what is going on in their own account. Make this a condition of their continued use of Facebook (and if your child is of an age that they are asking to open an account soon, make this a condition before saying yes)! You can make a commitment that you will stay silent in the background and don’t embarrass your child by commenting or liking any of their comments.

To most teenagers, having large numbers of “friends” on Facebook makes them feel more popular and they can therefore be quite indiscriminate with who they “friend”. Sit down with your child and ask them to go through their list of Facebook “friends” one-by-one, explaining to you exactly how (or even just if) they know them personally. Ask them to remove any friends that they have never met face-to-face.

Go through your child’s Facebook Privacy Settings with them, taking care to look through every single option and judge what are the most appropriate settings. I would highly recommend that no setting should be set to anything higher than “Friends Only”. If your child has even “just” 200 friends, and each of these has the same, a status update or photo upload by your child could potentially be seen by 40,000+ people! So even though the term “Friends of Friends” might seem like a reasonable connection to allow, on Facebook this can quickly escalate to stellar numbers, especially in teenage circles.

Take a look with your child through the apps they have installed in their account. Assess which are actually still actively being used by the child and delete all others. For those that are still being used, check that any status updates can only be viewed by the account holder or friends at the most.

Get your child to enable the Tagging Approval setting. This can be found in Privacy Settings/Timeline & Tagging.

Also switch off tag suggestions, found at the same location.

In Privacy Settings/Apps, Games & Websites change settings to disallow the use of your child’s data by apps installed by their friends.

Through continuous dialogue, get your child to understand the implications of sharing personal information with the world. Teenagers today are growing up in a world of global sharing and collaboration. This is not a bad thing in itself, it is just a new way of thinking that many of us adults are simply not used to. Learn to separate the positive from the negative and help your child to recognise long-term implications of their online activities. Shutting their online life down is not the solution. Teaching them to operate within it in a responsible and alert manner is the only way forward.

Some Terminology
Facebook Profile v. Facebook Page: People set up Facebook ‘profiles’, businesses/bands/organisations/brands etc. set up Facebook ‘pages’. Both look quite similar except that linking up on an FB page is one-directional (a fan of a business can simply click on a “like” button to show support for that business and agree to receive status updates from them) whereas linking up on a Facebook profile requires agreement from both parties (one person sends a “friend” request to another, and the recipient has to accept it before the two are fully connected and will now begin to receive each other’s status updates).

Timeline: Your Timeline is your main content location. It contains all your stories, your photos and videos, a list of your friends, your favourite activities and interests, and what used to be called your “Wall”. This is where your friends can leave you messages, and you can update the world with anything you feel like sharing.

News Feed: The News Feed is a continuous stream of updates about your friends’ activities on and off Facebook. It appears on your Home page. In addition to updates from friends, it will also show updates from the FB Pages you “like” (eg. special offers or new product announcements from brands, announcements of new album releases from bands and in the case of teenagers quite often jokes, funny images etc. from FB pages that are set up solely for entertainment purposes and don’t represent any actually entities)

Tagging: Users can upload images to Facebook for the purpose of sharing them with their friends. After uploading an image, they can “tag” a friend in the image by clicking on the friend’s face in the photo and typing their name into a field. If that friend also has a FB account, it will now link this image to their account as well (although the friend does not have any editing power over the image) and will appear in their Timeline. Taking this one step further, the image will now also appear in the News Feed of this friend’s friends! UNLESS the person tagged manually removes their tag from the image or specific privacy settings are put in place that require an “approval” step in the first place before a tag can be published. More about that later.

Messaging: Users can send each other direct messages via Facebook. As an alternative to public messages on each other’s Timeline, they are able to hold private conversations whilst both are logged into Facebook. When the “chat” is completed and closed down, there used to be no further record of it. However, now these chats are saved into the Messages functionality

Apps: These are small add-ons that can be installed within Facebook and which give the user some added functionality. For teenagers, apps will probably be mostly in the form of games but can also be used for video chat and to connect their Facebook accounts with other websites and social media sites. Apps are generally not produced by Facebook itself but rather by third-party app developers. There is no vetting of app quality and most apps will request some sort of access to user’s personal details in order to be installed. It is imperative that children understand the implications of allowing apps access to their information without taking a closer look at what is being requested. Often, apps will not only access the user’s own details but also those of their friends as well! Furthermore, many apps require the user to give permission to the app to post status updates in their Timelines on their behalf. This could be required for innocent updates such as game scores but should not be simply accepted as a matter of course.

Fraping: Facebook-Raping … “I got fraped!” This is the term used when another person enters a status update on your child’s account after having gained access to it (probably because your child shared his/her password). Most teenagers find this very funny and fraped comments are often something like “Mary is the most beautiful girl in the world. I really admire her style, she is so intelligent and I simply wish I could be more like her!” Here, the post was probably entered by Mary on her friend’s Facebook account and is quite innocent. However, the potential for harm is obvious.

If you do not have a Facebook account yourself and don’t feel confident enough to set up your own account in order to explore its inner workings, please contact me at carolin@intandem.ie.

ASK.FM

This is a social networking site that has only become prominent in recent months. However, in this short time it has made a serious impact and large numbers of teenagers will have opened an account. “Find out what people want to know about you!“ is its tagline. It currently has around 16 million users worldwide with 20 million questions being asked each day.

Ask.fm is a site dedicated entirely to questions and answers. Users can ask a question or submit answers. The site also allows users to post anonymously or with their name attached to their contribution. The answers can be either in text or video format. Users can check out other user profiles, which include the user’s interests and an area to submit a question directly to the specific user. The user profile also lists the number of answers the user has provided and how many likes they received by the Ask.fm community. Ask.fm is available in numerous languages, including German, English, Spanish, French, Italian, Norse, Polish, Portuguese, Russian and many more.

Ask.fm was founded in June of 2010. The application was intended to act as a conversational question and answer tool. Ask.fm would encourage users to interact and hold discussions to help find answers to the user’s questions. The company is based out of Riga, Latvia and currently consists of less than 10 individuals, including CEOs Ilja and Mark Terebin.

Unfortunately, whereas the original intention of the site might have been as an innocent conversational tool, in teenage circles it has quickly established itself as a forum for gossiping, sexual innuendo and in the most serious cases cyber-bullying.

Fortunately, most local teenagers seem to have deleted their ask.fm in light of recent tragic events as a mark of respect and in recognition of the pitfalls of such a site.

Recently, 12-year old Amy spoke with Francis Boylan on Ocean FM about ask.fm, discussing how it works and the dangers associated with the site. It is very worthwhile listening to the interview here: http://soundcloud.com/oceanfm/amy-who-spoke-to-francie

Guidelines

Simple: get your child to shut down their account if they have one.

If you decide to allow them to keep their account, make sure you take a look at their page regularly to see whether there are any posts of concern. However, remember that you will only see questions that have been answered! If your child receives inappropriate questions but does not answer them, they will not appear on the page and you will be none the wiser that there could be a problem.

OTHER SOCIAL MEDIA AND GUIDELINES

I have uploaded a PDF file containing a series of guidance sheets for teenagers and parents about all things online. These fact sheets originate from the website http://www.netsmartz.org/ and you can download the document here: http://www.carolincollins.com/info/Online-Tips.pdf

As always, your comments are welcome at dromahairydiary@gmail.com