My 10yr old daughter has been hassling me for an IM account of some form.
She even asked her elder brother to intervene on her behalf. His reply was “forget it, dad will find out and anyway you won’t get past his defenses”. That’s true for now. My 21yr old on the other hand could almost certainly worm his way past them if it wasn’t for the fact he has freedom of access already.
You may not agree with my approach – my wife does, but then she tends to defer tech arguments and decisions to me anyway – but we have made a conscious decision to restrict the access our children have to all things tech related (and thay includes the TV, Wii, DS’s, etc) until they can:
- mostly allocate their own time to ensure homework, chores, etc are done
- respond appropriately to any dangers
- understand the dangers and
- know how to respond to and deal with any problems that may arise.
Until then they’ll be locked down, restricted to a walled garden, have limited time access, etc, etc ….
But what have I learnt from raising one child to an adult and having two others following along? What can we teach our children and for that matter adults that seem to stray into areas they shouldn’t? Let’s face it, most of us at one time or another fall for a sucker punch – be that an April Fool’s gag, a phishing email or … well you can fill the blanks.
Some or all of these tips may help protect you and your family:
* Treat links in messages on any social networking (SN) site as you would links in email messages.
* If you must follow the link then manually type it out – preferably do it within the confines of a VM or Sandboxed system.
* Be wary of ANY personal information you post from your real name to your age to your address to pictures. The more we put out there the more likely we’ll get spammed, trolled, hacked. Also you have to presume that anything you put on the internet is there to stay. Does the 17yr old you want the 35yr old you to be mis-read or rejected for a job because of something you said many moons ago?
* Use hard to guess passwords. I remain amazed that folks don’t do this and even more amazed that lots of allegedly ‘secure’ sites only allow simple passwords. As a minimum make your passwords unique to each site, 8 characters or more long of which two are numbers one is a symbol and at least one of your letters is capitalised.
* Don’t use auto-import tools to scan your email address book. If your account is compromised then they now have access to all your friends email accounts too.
* Opinions are divided on this one – personally I use Facebook only for family, friends and those I’ve built up a trust with over a period of time. Lots of folks on Twitter love to ask you to also follow them on facebook … !
* Be sure to check out the SN site – especially their privacy policy regarding your content.
* Be aware that you likely won’t be able to control content put up by others – as much as you may not like it.
* Watch out for addons. Lots of folks love Farmville and there was nothing wrong with that but there are lots of fake applications and their sole purpose is to extract information or clicks from you.
* If you are in work, then think twice about using a SN site. Double check your company policy and if you are allowed then rule one is “Don’t dicuss your company or colleagues in any way shape or form”.
I’m certain there are many more tips but they escape me for now …
- Have you any you can add to mine?
- Do you agree with my stance?
Absolutely I agree with you. There are hackers everywhere, and a handful of friends recently had their emails hacked for spam purposes. I recommend a partially pseudo identity or slightly different birth date just in case. Addons….I hate addons. They sent every one of my friends an advertisement to whatever site. I never trust those things.
Some great tips!
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Good shout Mike.
I have upwards of 10 email accounts which are used for very different purposes and in public forums I tend to use data that is close to mine but not – that way if it is comprimised they can't use it to impersonate me.
Good post from a parent's perspective. Yes, I agree– this should be read in tandem with my post How to Safeguard Your Identity Online. :D
My children are about the same age. We use IM but it is to communicate with each other throughout the house (it's better than hollering!). I'm even uncomfortable with a third-party IM. I've been searching for a good (free) network LAN chat that doesn't stink… haven't found one yet.
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Hi There, thank you for your comment on my website by the way, even though you pointed at me being an Apple fanboy ;) (this isn't the case! I am an avid and sworn by Windows user who runs his servers with Debian).
I recommend tweeking your daugters identity just like Mike with the D.O.B, and setting up a dud email account to recover passwords to. Hacking is a terrible thing and your daughter should be wary whilst online mate.
Have a good day, anyway. Feel free to pop by my site any time :).
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Thanks for the comment Jakk – for some reason you got flagged as spam. It was only whilst investigating why some spam is getting through that I noticed your genuine comment – I get few enough that I don't want the good ones being spammed off!
OK – apologies for the fanboi comment, I guess it was a little OTT and was meant to be tongue in cheek.
On to your point – absolutely agree. When she's finally allowed a social media account then I will advise her to do just that and if needs be do it myself.
@Staurt
Excellent I think it would be for the best.
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