Safe internet use for your children
The technology timeline for kids and teens is far from straightforward. Not every kid/teenager uses the same technology. Factors such as the child’s maturity level; parents’ view; and access to devices at home, school and friend’s houses come into play.
With this in mind, we are sharing an ‘essentials’ checklist for parents of children of any age, which highlights the actions you should take for your whole family.
These are by no means definitive lists (the tech world moves far too quickly to be able to promise that!) but they are a good starting point. We hope you find them useful.
- Be aware of certain activities that are treated as cybercrimes by law:
- Cyber stalking – where someone is repeatedly and persistently followed and pursued online by email or other electronic means.
- Cyber bullying – where someone harasses, embarrasses, taunts, insults or uses threatening behaviour by using internet, email or other electronic means.
- Child pornography – where someone captures/displays/sends images or videos of child/children (below 18 years) in an obscene or indecent (i.e. sexually explicit) manner.
- Pornography – where someone captures/displays/sends images or videos of the private body parts of any person without his/her consent.
- Hacking – where someone accesses or uses the computer/laptop/mobile or email or social sites’ accounts of another person without authorization/consent of that person (such as Gmail, Facebook, Twitter and other such social networking sites). This includes destroying or deleting or altering any information residing on such devices/websites.
- Identity theft – where someone uses the password or any other unique identification feature of another person without authorization/consent of that person.
- Cyber terrorism – where someone attempts to gain access to a computer/laptop/mobile without authorization/consent or causes denial of access to that person who is authorized to access that computer/laptop/mobile.
- Offensive communication – where someone sends any grossly offensive information of another person which is known to be false for the purpose of annoying, inconveniencing, insulting, deceiving, or taking vengeance.