Protecting Your Children

 

As a concerned parent, I thought I was really on top of controlling the security risks and the Internet access for my nine year old son.  I recently attended a meeting between parents at my son’s school and the local police unit that deals directly with Internet porn and abuse related to children.  I was greatly surprised to see the realities of these risks.  In this post I will share some of what I learned from them. This meeting also led me to research further on other risks for children on the Internet. There are many good web reference sites with other material including books.  My research led me to discover one other major risk we face for children and that is identity theft. I will speak to child identity theft in another post.

The prevalent Internet risks for children include things such as bullying, pornography, child abuse, ‘sexting’ to name just a few. The statistics on a survey of children in the EU for exposure to these risks are astounding. It is not surprising that the risks are high considering the usage (see  usage study ). One fundamental point I took away from the police unit presentation is the importance of communication between parents and their children. I was horrified to hear the actual stories of parents who had no idea that their teenagers were in continuous contact with adult predators on the internet and the related problems this contact led to with the predator.  Many of these stories involved what most of us would consider as good kids with very caring parents.  I was also surprised to hear how this risk extends down to younger age children on what we might think are safe web sites. Predators are signing on to sites especially virtual worlds where innocent interaction with other players provides them with an initial contact point that leads to chat rooms, sharing of personal formation and eventually to things beyond our worst fears.

 

Predators try to befriend children and they will say anything necessary to gain the trust of an unsuspecting child.  They may pretend to be boys or girls or younger children when they are not. Once they get a child to start talking to them they strive to become their best and most trusted friend. They will say things like ”you can talk to me because we are on the Internet and no one can figure out who you are” or they will say  “you can talk to me I will listen to you and help you” this is especially effective when children feel their parents are not listening. These approaches take advantage of the major misconception held by many people not just children.  People think that the anonymous nature of the Internet allows for an ability to share anything we want because no one will know who we are and that is the single leading factnor that gets children in trouble, because the reverse is also true and you never know who you are talking to.

 

The adage of “Do Not Talk To Strangers” is significant in its application to Internet communications.  An innocent conversation with a fellow player in a virtual world with what a child thinks is another child may lead that child in to a conversation with an adult predator instead. The predators know what they are doing and they take advantage of the anonymity provided by the Internet to pretend to be someone that they are not.

 

Once an attacker gains trust they may start to use peer pressure and sophisticated social engineering to get children to initiate or take part in inappropriate behavior. If any inappropriate behavior occurs they will use blackmail and threaten exposure of the activity to parents or peers to make children continue the behavior and take it further.

 

As an example for the parents, the police unit provided the parents with a live demonstration using various chat rooms which the police regularly monitor and where they carry out undercover sting operations.  We signed on to the chat rooms pretending to be a 13 year girl while really being a room full of adults and I was very surprised at how quickly we were solicited for all kinds of things. I was also surprised at the language and persuasiveness used  by the chat room participants. It was evident that this problem is serious and wide-spread and that an attacker could easily take advantage of a child.

There are lots of actions parents take to protect their children from these threats. Some parents take drastic action like not allowing children any Internet access at all.  This could be a major disadvantage to students who regularly compete with other children who use the Internet for research on home work and learning in general.  Some parents employ family protection software, some allow Internet access only when an adult is present etc.   Remembering my own childhood and thinking about what I was hearing, I came to the conclusion that appropriate age level communication with children about the reality these threats was probably one of the best preventive parenting actions.

 

Children can rebel against many things including their parents at different points in their lives.  The last thing intended is to have the child rebel and engage in inappropriate actions on the Internet to express their rebellion. This leads me to think that sharing information with children on what is good and bad behavior on the Internet and also sharing the reason why things are good or bad is extremely important.  There will always come a time when we have to depend on each child to make good decisions on their own based upon their understanding of good and bad.   Of course, parents must also provide adult supervision to children who have not yet reached the age where they are capable of making decisions on their own, so coupling the communication with other actions and tools is appropriate and required.

 

Other preventative measures can include many things.  For example, the police officers highly recommended that no child be allowed to have a computer in their bedroom.  They recommended instead that parents use a shared central room for family access of the computer. Additionally, there are many good family safety applications commercially available, which monitor and restrict access for children on the Internet. I am considering using BSecure, which seems to have a very good track record.  In the interim, I am currently using the Windows Live free Family Safety application, which any Windows Live user can immediately start using.  This application also sends me weekly reports on my son’s overall computer usage.

 

Most of the best of these applications use “white lists” which restrict access to only a limited set of sites selected by the user. Some use “Black lists”, which prevent access to known bad sites and which the application automatically updates based upon user input. Others use both white and black lists and many of them also can also restrict language, time of access, or type of access to things like chat or instant messages.