Online Safety Guide For Parents
Online Safety as great as school holidays are for families, it can be difficult for many parents who, due to work or other commitments, don’t have the time supervise their kids 24/7 during the up coming spring break.
According to a recent study, children and teens spend an average of 6-8 hours a day surfing, streaming and playing online games. During the summer break, when they have unprecedented access to the online world, the number of hours is expected to increase at least 20{1f125d81ae85bed3a151f062ab6e4c3e063cc58f373c23f561306ad2b03a9be2}.
While the internet is considered a great platform for entertainment, virtual socialising and seeking information – as well being a handy baby sitter – the online world has it’s dark side.
Recently, disturbing reports of Australian children being targeted by predators on a new app called Yellow have emerged. Described as a cross between Snapchat and Tinder, Yellow has more than five million users and is growing in popularity among school-aged teens.
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Where Snapchat allows kids to chat and interact with their friends, Yellow encourages them to ‘find new friends on Snapchat’ by ‘swiping right on the images you like, and left on the ones that leave you cold’. It’s free to join and very easy to meet new ‘friends’ and chat with them. Unfortunately, there have been reports of children being pressured to share nude photos while using this app.
From a parent’s point of view, stories like this can be alarming. As much as you try to supervise your children when they are online, you can’t always be looking over their shoulder. Of course, nothing takes the place of making sure your children are well educated and aware of the dangers lurking on the internet and encouraging them to make smart decisions online. But there are also practical measures you can take to reduce their risk of exposure to some of the more unsavoury elements they might encounter.
There are a number of safety measures you can put into place to help make the internet a safer place for your children;
You can configure the parental control settings on your IT devices and the modem. By setting the content control level to Low, Medium or High to you can ensure you’re comfortable with the sites your kids can see online.
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Portable devices (like tablets, surface etc) and mobile phones, also have parental control settings to restrict certain apps or disable specific functions, so you need to invest some time to check the settings them before you pass them on to your children.
The Daniel Morcombe Foundation has released this video, a guide to helping keep your children safe in an online environment. While confronting, it’s a must watch for every parent.
If you find all of this a bit daunting, or you don’t feel confident enough to set the parental controls yourself, call us on 1300 489 434 or contact us and we will come to your home or office and help you identify the level of parental controls required and set it all up for you.
Our tech team can also support clean up your system and put systems in to prevent malware & other viruses from attacking your computer, keeping your data safe.
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