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Eight Essential Rules Parents Should Enforce for their Childrens Online PrivacyThe Internet is a vast, wondrous place. It literally puts the world at your fingertips. This information superhighway is a godsend to many researchers and you can even pay bills or order a pizza online. It is probably one of the best technological advances of our time. However, there is also a dark side as well. Scammers run rampant on the Internet as well as pornography and worst of all, child predators.
With email, chat rooms, message boards and instant messaging, there are countless ways for a predator to make contact with your child online. Social networking websites like MySpace and several others compound the problem. You cannot watch your kids all the time while they are online, so how do you safeguard their online privacy? There is no one way to ensure that your
child will never be exposed to something derogatory or harmful online; however, as a parent, you can take some steps to enforce your childrens online privacy. Here are eight essential rules that might help you:
1. Keep your childrens computer in a common area of the home like a nook in the kitchen or the family room. It should be someplace easily accessible so that you can monitor their computer activity at any time. Most kids know when they are somewhere where they shouldnt be online or chatting with inappropriate people. It is a lot harder to hide that activity when you can monitor them.
2. Talk with your children about revealing information. Your child should never use their real name when chatting online or visiting website where interactions with others occur. Creating a cool screen name is the way to stay relatively anonymous. In addition, caution them to never give our personal information like their home address, phone numbers or even post family photos. With websites like MySpace.com, it is important to not list information that can easily be traced by a pervert, stalker or other predator. Giving out real names, school names and places and even a blog listing their daily activities could be a no-no. Enterprising weirdoes can easily trace those things back to your child.
3. Parents If you are concerned about your childrens online activity, there is special software you can purchase and install on your computer that will track your childrens online movements. A lot of this software is installed without their knowledge and you can print logs of their activities. When you find questionable websites, you can talk with them about it.
4. Part of protecting your childrens online privacy is learning the ins and outs of the Internet yourself. If you are not comfortable with navigating the net, take a class on it. Kids these days know how to erase their browsing history and other ways of covering their Internet tracks. As a parent, you have to be a step ahead of them.
5. Read the privacy policies of the websites your children visit. You should be aware of what type of information these online businesses collect, especially if it involves your children. You should also find out what the webmasters do with that collected information.
6. Teach your children that their online privacy is important. They should not trust what anyone says at face value. Their new ten-year-old friend online could really be a fifty year old adult looking to lure a child into meeting them.
7. Pop-up windows, weird email attachments and invitations to chat from a stranger should also be red flags. Ask your children to come and get you whenever any of these things happens to them. Explain that someone could hijack their computer, harass them or damage their computer through a virus.
8. Finally, as a parent, you should keep apprised of the most popular websites for children these days. Make a list of approved websites they can visit and put a password lock on everything else. Your kids will have to come to you if they want to access a website not on their approved list.
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