Top 7 Internet Safety Rules For Minors

The internet has become an integral part of our lives, for both adults and children alike. People use the internet for a wide assortment of activities, such as homework or socialising with friends. The internet is the perfect arena for a child to learn in, but, as a parent, you need to be sure your child is safe. The number and variety of threats online are real and range from cyberbullying to adults impersonating minors.

In this article, I have put together a number of tips you can use to ensure the safety of your child.

1. Protect Personal Affix

This may or may not be possible, depending on the circumstances. If your child needs to be identified for a classroom discussion or homework, then concessions will need to be made, in all other situations, such information should be guarded.

Depending on your child’s age, they may already have their own student identification number. Such identification numbers create the perfect avenue for you to protect the identity if your child while on the net.

When in class, none of the information highlighted below should be used to identify your child, either on an online discussion or a posted grades sheet:

• Home Address
• Full Name
• Photograph
• Birthday
• Social Security Number

You should also ensure that your child has his/her own username and password to log into lectures, courses and assignments.

2. Ensure Everything Is Up-To-Date

This is probably something you don’t think much of, but the reality is, that it’s amongst the most effective ways to keep your child safe while on the internet. Just make sure all devices used are up to date.

Keeping everything up to date can be quite time-consuming, but the truth behind all of this is that, many companies will release updates for their software which will provide security updates and vulnerability fixes, that will ultimately protect your child.

Additionally, an operating system that is outdated, could mean, certain settings no longer work, such as your parental control measures.

3. Setup Social Media Privacy Settings

You will need to find out how your child is using their security and privacy settings in their various social media apps, as these settings controls who has access to what. Almost all of these social media services allow users to post publicly, but also like the user to enable private posts, so that they can determine who can or cannot view their posts.

Social media apps will also allow you to limit the number of followers you can have. Your objective should be to ask them what kind of settings they are using to protect their sensitive data. That way you can devise a more secure method of doing these things. There are certain things, posts that they may put on their social timelines that may be best served being private. You need to get them thinking about these things.

4. Dangerous Internet Neighbourhoods

You should sit down with your child and have a serious conversation about the various things they do, while online. You must understand that not everything on the net is appropriate for them, with many things even possibly causing them harm.

Here are some steps you may want to take:

• Sit down with your child and hash out a list of sites that are suitable for your child to visit. This needs to be mutually agreed upon.
• All internet browsers allow you to look at the internet history of whoever last used it. So you should do that, and block any sites you do not want them revisiting in the future.
• There are safety modes that you can use, which will filter out certain content, such as adult content.

5. Password Safety

When it comes to password safety, this is an issue for both children and adults alike. Many web surfers simply do not spend enough time making unique passwords for all the different services that they access. Most will make the mistake of recycling old passwords for a large number of sites. This presents a serious security threat.

To protect your child, you should take the following steps:

• Sit down with them and help them create complex passwords. That is, a password of at least 12 characters with numbers and letters (both upper and lowercase), and special characters, if it’s supported.
• Help them create a safe storage location for their passwords and tell them, never to give said information out to anyone, regardless.

6. Don’t Log Into Apps with Social Media Accounts

This is another thing for you to think about. Avoid allowing your child to use social media services such as Facebook to log into apps and other services. While, in the vast majority of cases, this does prove to be faster, using services like Facebook to enable a third-party app, this leads to your personal information being sent out to data brokers and the like.

It has also proven to be a security risk. If the same username and password is used across all the different platforms you’re signed up with, and this information just happens to show up in a data breach (which isn’t uncommon), scammers would now have access to all of this information on that particular website service or app you’re connected to. Moreover, when one of these apps grants access to something like contacts, then they are essentially giving people access to private information.

7. Phishing Scams

While most children aren’t likely to have much money or even a bank account, especially not one with any real money in it, that doesn’t mean they can’t fall prey to phishing scams. One of the main objectives of any phishing scam is to obtain the personal information of their victim, which is often done by infecting the target machine with a malicious file. This means, such attempts could end up damaging your system, ultimately costing you, the parent a ton of money to repair.

To avoid this situations, you can take the following steps:

• Teach your child to report any suspicious activity.
• Make sure your children know what a suspicious email looks like and not to open one, when they see it.
• Tell your child never to give out their personal information, especially bank details, usernames, etc.

–AUTHOR INFO—

Uchenna Ani-Okoye is a former IT Manager who now runs his own computer support website https://www.compuchenna.co.uk.