Maybe it sounds a bit old of me, but I am just not sure I love the technology age that we are in. I think that it invites the potential for people to know more about you than they should. Realize that every time you type information into a Google search, you immediately start getting emails in your inbox about that particular thing that you were researching online. You must be very careful about the information you enter online as anyone can be looking at you and what you are doing. As a mother it concerns me even more, and I have told my kids to not put any information about themselves up online. One day I was watching a show about internet predators, and they showed how putting up even just pictures about yourself and what town you live in could provide a predator with enough information to come after a kid that they “like”. They showed how if a kid puts in their real town or even their state, how if they also put up some pictures of themselves and their friends you can usually find one that either shows a school shirt or a team jersey or something to that affect. That combined with their age, can actually provide an internet predator with a pretty accurate location of your child. It is pretty frightening.
Then they showed a family where the teenage girl had been communicating with what she thought was a kid online and it turned out it was a grown up and he began calling her house and the family was so afraid that they had to move. They didn’t realize that people who are good at this internet stuff can find you even if you don’t tell them exactly who you are. They had tried changing their number, but he just kept getting their new #. It was really scary.
I don’t allow my kids to access a computer that is out of my view. I have two computers and they are both in one of the main rooms of the house, where their father or myself can come walking past at any time. I also installed a program called big brother on the computer that the kids use most often. It was an online down load and cost me about $50.00, but it will save all the words the kid’s type, all their passwords, and also take screen shots at set intervals so you can see exactly what they are accessing. You can hide this in your computer, so the kids don’t even know that it is there. Now I can check out and see exactly who they are talking to and what they are saying. I can enter their my space accounts and see exactly who they are talking to. You can say this is an invasion of their privacy and maybe so, but as a parent, if I need to be responsible for their actions, then I need to know what their actions are so I can be truly accountable. My kids trust me and for the most part, I trust them. I still however realize that they very easily could unknowingly get themselves into trouble in the internet world. After all, they are still just kids.
Posted on Thursday, May 01, 2008 9:56 AM by Carol Ann