Good Article for Parents About Online Safety
Education of both parents and children is key to any successful online safety strategy, and the founders of KidSafe are taking just that approach. [read more].
The article points out that parents should create an Internet safety contract with their kids, but the article does not go into detail about what the contract should contain. To those parents interested in the idea and seeing what such a contract would look like, I invite you to read our Gameplan. The InternetSafety.com Gameplan sets out core agreements that a family can make together about responsible online use, and provides a solid bedrock of principles that if applied will lead to safer online interactions.
The one part of the article that I find a bit strange is the following sentence: “In fact, 95% of all abuse and exploitation can be prevented through education.” 95% is a pretty big percentage to be throwing around without any source or research to back it up. While we see education as a core necessity in Internet safety, I fail to see how this deals with situations like typosquatting and some cases of predation and cyberbullying.
Do you believe that education alone can keep a child safe online, or do you believe that a combination of both education, rules, and the necessary tools to enforce those rules is the safest route?
Filed under: Internet Safety News
That depends what you mean by ’safe.’
It is impossible to use the internet without, eventually, seeing something pornographic and/of disgusting. There are plenty of trolls who like to post it in random forums just as a prank. Right now there is a debate going on at xxxchurch on the subject of why classical art is never thought of as porn, and some very graphic classics are being discussed. Even with a filter, no filter can be perfect. So, if your definition of ’safe’ is safe from seeing porn, then that is a standard that can never be met.
What education can do is prepare someone to expect to find porn from time to time, and accept it as just a fact of life on the internet. The correct response is to simply ignore it.
Much the same goes for this ‘cyberbullying.’ There’s an old cliche bit of advise about real-world bullies that says they will stop if ignored. In the real world, it doesn’t work: Ignore a bully and they will eventually give up, but not before trying harder to draw a response. Online, it works perfectly. The worst they can do is send insults and be annoying, and anyone who can’t take some insults has no business being on the internet. Debates in political forums often end with someone being called a nazi.
The mistake of simply filtering is to demand a sanitized, child-safe internet. That cannot be done. It goes against the very nature of the internet. You can’t give them a childrens’ internet, so just prepare them to deal with the adult one instead – with it’s trolls, spam, viruses and randomly appearing porn.
[...] Great Article for Parents About Online Safety By online guardian Posted οn July 27th, 2010 bу Stanley Holditch [...]