What I would do if I was a parent: 1.Educate the kids NOT to give out their home address, phone numbers, bank details, parents credit card numbers or other personally identifying information online to anyone and to never go meet online "friends" in real life unless they told 2.Stress the point that people who you meet online are total strangers and should be treated exactly the same way as any other stranger 3.Set up a PC specifically for the kids with a good anti-virus and other things to cut out the nasties in case they bump into them 4.Educate them about the things they should stay away from (porn, sex, viruses, spyware, pedophiles etc) 5.Get them an email address from hotmail or gmail or yahoo
What I wouldn't worry about: 1.The kids signing up for and posting on most web forums (including nickname, hotmail/yahoo/gmail address, password) since they know what they arent allowed to post and how much trouble they would get into if they posted it. 2.Filtering software or hardware (the kids would know what not to access and what would happen if they did access it) 3.The kids finding stuff they shouldn't by mistake. I have been using the internet since the days when "the internet" meant dialing up to a Unix box with a terminal program and I have never found porn or other "bad" content by mistake. (the exception being viruses and spyware but a good AV stops that)
You know, accidentally bumping into the nasty stuff has become less common. I specifically remember a time when accidentally typing dinsey.com instead of disney.com would bring up some interesting things. I do believe to this day that whitehouse.com is still nothing like whitehouse.gov. In other words there is an entire business model that has evolve around typos and accidentally typing the wrong root level domain. Not only can people accidentally end up on those sites, there are people that count on those accidents for revenue. Just because you are a savvy surfer does not mean that it doesn't commonly happen.
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What I would do if I was a parent:
1.Educate the kids NOT to give out their home address, phone numbers, bank details, parents credit card numbers or other personally identifying information online to anyone and to never go meet online "friends" in real life unless they told
2.Stress the point that people who you meet online are total strangers and should be treated exactly the same way as any other stranger
3.Set up a PC specifically for the kids with a good anti-virus and other things to cut out the nasties in case they bump into them
4.Educate them about the things they should stay away from (porn, sex, viruses, spyware, pedophiles etc)
5.Get them an email address from hotmail or gmail or yahoo
What I wouldn't worry about:
1.The kids signing up for and posting on most web forums (including nickname, hotmail/yahoo/gmail address, password) since they know what they arent allowed to post and how much trouble they would get into if they posted it.
2.Filtering software or hardware (the kids would know what not to access and what would happen if they did access it)
3.The kids finding stuff they shouldn't by mistake. I have been using the internet since the days when "the internet" meant dialing up to a Unix box with a terminal program and I have never found porn or other "bad" content by mistake. (the exception being viruses and spyware but a good AV stops that)
You know, accidentally bumping into the nasty stuff has become less common. I specifically remember a time when accidentally typing dinsey.com instead of disney.com would bring up some interesting things. I do believe to this day that whitehouse.com is still nothing like whitehouse.gov. In other words there is an entire business model that has evolve around typos and accidentally typing the wrong root level domain. Not only can people accidentally end up on those sites, there are people that count on those accidents for revenue. Just because you are a savvy surfer does not mean that it doesn't commonly happen.