My friend, Marcy, recently found out that her 12-year-old daughter had a Facebook account (now deleted) even though she was expressly forbidden to have one. Marcy found out by checking her daughter’s email account when the filters on her home computers blocked access to Gmail. (She was helping her daughter get permission to use Gmail on the family laptop, and saw the emails coming in from Facebook.) Now Marcy is looking into programs that will email reports of her daughter’s online activity while she’s at work.
We’ve all heard about “sexting” in the news, the hysteria around it and what kids think about it, too. This leads me to wonder what parents are doing to teach their kids how to be safe – and smart – online. Do you tell your older kids not to put questionable pictures of themselves on Facebook? Have you friended your kids online to monitor them and their friends? (I have several friends who do this.)
What are you telling your children about online safety? At what age should you start the discussion? What rules are you putting in place to protect your children?
Here at Mom Central Technology, we try to let you know about the latest programs to monitor your children’s online behavior from PGKey to Safe Eyes Mobile. Another cyber safety resource is Yahoo!
Here are Yahoo!’s top 10 links for keeping your child safe online:
1. Yahoo! Safely - a complete resource for all things cyber correct.
2. Create a family pledge for Online Safety.
3. Applying a filter to your child’s Yahoo! Mail account is simple by creating a family account to monitor your child’s use of Yahoo! and edit and maintain their account settings.
4. Yahoo! Mail uses the latest technology to combat spam and to help protect you from phishing and viruses. Yahoo!’s spam guard will filter out 97% of all things bad, so your child won’t accidentally click on something.
5. You can flag photos on Flickr for abuse via the “Report Abuse” link that’s available in the footer of every page.
6. Four things to know before your child goes online: info.yahoo.com/safely/us/yahoo.
7. Report abuse on any Yahoo! property at abuse.yahoo.com.
8. Keep private things private. Manage your online profile.
9. Yahoo!'s SafeSearch feature is designed to filter out explicit, adult-oriented content from Yahoo! Search results.
10. Keep up to date with our safety experts blogs.
Thanks for the article! I listed it on my Keeping Your Kids Safe post!
http://fantasticfind.blogspot.com/2009/08/keeping-your-kids-safe.html
Posted by: Chels | September 01, 2009 at 02:47 PM
I just saw this posting and am in a similar situation. I just wanted to put out there in case you haven't found out yet how I deleted his fb account:
go to help center and type in report under age
Click on What happens if my child creates an account under the age of 13
report here
click on "here" which is the 3rd paragraph down
also you can click on the next paragraph at "here" to request data I think?
I did this after finding and having my son log in. After you log in and go to setting you can deactivate, but it doesn't make any sense since they can just log back in with the same information and it reactivates. At least if you report them they take email address information and other stuff so you know it will be flagged.
I don't allow my child to have a computer in his room, however still he went online either at school or the library and signed up for FB. I am always in the living room where the computer so can see what he is doing and he found a way around it. You just have to be diligent and it doesn't hurt to have their password as a condition on them having an email account or other things. I regularly monitor his account and have actually found a chat stream on gmail of where there was something inappropriate and I emailed the kid telling them I monitor all the time so would appreciate if they did not behave that way email or chatting with my son. I told them nicely if I see it again I will forward to their mother :) Yes, sometimes you have to play hardball
hope this helps someone
Posted by: maria | February 13, 2010 at 04:15 PM