Playing Games Online Safely

Posted by Joyce on February 4, 2009 under Child Internet Safety, Children's Internet Safety, Internet Safety, Internet Safety For Kids, Internet Safety Rules, Internet Safety for Teens, Internet Scams, Internet Software Filters, Kids Internet Safety, Online Games, Phishing Scams | Read the First Comment

Playing Games Online Safely

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Did you get your kids those new electronic games, cell phones and computers for Christmas?

Did you teach them how to be safe online when using them, too?

Bad Santa!

Many of these electronic items allow Internet access or have the ability to send and receive messages, pictures and videos.

As a parent, you should realize that many of these allow your child to play with people from all over the world. They can also communicate with them.

So, it’s time to have a chat with your child about using any or all of these items. Here’s my 3 Post-Christmas Internet Safety Gaming Quick Tips:

1. Make sure your game player knows to not give out personal information to fellow game players. This
is information such as their names, ages, address, school or phone numbers.

2. Check the game system instructions for information about privacy controls and parental restrictions that can protect children.

3. Encourage children to report inappropriate contact with strangers, especially sexually suggestive comments, attempts and such.

For Your Tween
Just because these items connect to the Internet does not mean you actually have to do it. Assess what comfort level you have with your child alone online. Assess their ability to understand the most basic online safety skills. If either of these have the slightest uncomfortable feeling to it, do not connect them to the Internet. Neither you nor your child are ready to take on the world of online strangers at this time.

For Your Teen
Teach them to be part of the solution. Teens understand the Internet and its connections to others, especially people they don’t know. Make sure your teen readily accepts the responsibility to online safety practices in exchange for the privilege of being online, no matter if they TEXT, FLIX or PIX. Empowering them with trust and respect for themselves and others will go a long way.

Until next week!
-Joyce
…keeping kids safe online

Amber Alert Scams And How To Protect Yourself

Posted by Joyce on October 6, 2008 under Internet Scams, Phishing Scams | Comments are off for this article

Scams? With missing children?

You Bet! Its unfortunate but true. There are some scurrilous individuals around that play the “missing child” alert to scrape and steal email addresses for their spamming purposes.

Even child safety experts get side tracked by this.

The alert came via a business contact who emailed an Amber Alert to us. The alert mentioned a 13 year old girl missing in Ohio. It was sent via an email chain with innumerable addresses on it.

One of the respondents, a journalist colleague, shot back an email immediately saying it was a scam and how it works and why it is potentially being sent around.

How did he know? How can you understand what is a phishing scam and what is not? Here’s what he knew and how you can start to pick out the scams, too, and protect yourself.

First, stay calm. “Oh No! Another Child Missing! Let’s help!” is a natural reaction. That is my point, it’s a reaction. Take time to read further.

Two, true and valid Amber Alerts do not come as singular emails forwarded on from individual to individual.

Third, check to see if the email address is valid or a dead link.

As a rule, whenever you get questionable stuff like this type of email, go to Google. Simply enter it in the Google search box and add the word urbanlegend. Or, you can go to www.snopes.com.

With these two tools you can find out very quickly whether it is real or not. The second thing that people are not aware of is that often these emails are used to gather email addresses for email spamming. If you scroll down you can see everyone who every got this line… when you get those ads for breast enlargement etc, you know where it came from!