What does LMIRL mean, and why, you as a parent, need to know.?
What should you be doing with your child before they go online?
What do you need to do on a regular basis to make sure your child's online activities are safe?
To get these answers and many more join our newsletter and we will send you an information guide to protecting your children online.
Or for more information click here.
A National Telecommunications & Information Administration report indicated that 90% of American youth between the ages of 5-17 (48 million teens) use the Internet. An I-Safe Inc. Assessment survey completed in 2002-2003 of 4,400 students showed that 81.1% spent at least one hour a week on the Internet and another I-safe Inc Parent survey in 2003-2004 showed that parents estimated that 29.8% of their children spent more than six hours a week on the Internet. Children are spending their time online in Social Networking Sites, E-mail, Instant Messaging (IMing), Chat Rooms, Gaming Sites, Downloading Sites, and Web Browsing.
The most well known Social Networking Site is MySpace (a user count listed at 200,000,000), although Facebook (a user count listed as 39,000,000), and numerous others (Wikipedia lists 92 different Social Networking Sites). Parents need to know the content of these sites, there specific dangers and be able to communicate these to their children. There are several good monitoring software programs that can keep track of your child's Myspace activities.
A news report earlier this year stated that there were 29,000 sex offenders with MySpace accounts. This includes only those that used their own names.
The Postini StatTrack showed that in one 24 hour period in September 2007, there were 560,922,296 emails, 86% of which was spam. It also showed that 1 in 442 of the emails was infected with a virus. Teaching your children how to handle email is vital to your computers health and with current phishing activity possibly your financial health as well.
There are an estimated 2,500,000,000 pornographic emails sent daily.
The most well known and largest Instant Messaging client is AIM (AOL Instant Messaging), with numerous others available including Yahoo! Messenger. The risks involved in Instant Messaging have to be considered by parents and either solutions preventing their use or at least safeguards should be put into place if children are permitted to instant message.
40% of online sexual solicitations of youth begin with an Instant Message
Originally Chat Rooms were text based with people sending messages real time to people in the same "chat room." The most well known text based chat room is IRC (Internet Relay Chat). More recently visual chat rooms have developed, which allow for the user to show an "avatar" representing themselves or in some cases the use of a webcam so that the other people in the room can see them. Chat rooms are considered one of the highest risk activities on the Internet, and parents need to know of their risks and be able to convey that to their children.
Research indicates 80% of cyber predators go to sexually-oriented chat rooms and are quite explicit about their intentions.
Many children spend most of their online time gaming, and there are countless sites that provide online games to children of all ages. Many of these sites are harmless and are sponsored by well known and trusted companies. However, others are less reliable and there are risks involved ranging from predators using the sites for access to children, to malicious software being sent through what appears to be harmless online games. How to recognize safe sites, and how to make sure your children are safe while playing these online games.
South Korea, a country with many active gamers, had over 22,000 reported cases of various types of virtual crime involving games in 2003.
Pirating of music has been rampant since the development of Napster. More recently with faster Internet services, file sharing sites and programs have made access to all types of files from music to movies available online. There are many risks involved in this activity ranging from malicious code being downloading in the files, to legal prosecution for piracy. Parents are responsible for their child's online activities and can be held financially and legally responsible for those activities. Learning how to protect yourself and your children from these areas are another area of Internet safety that although not normally considered a concern by parents, has to be recognized as the risk it is.
Popular Internet services that allow computer users to swap music and video clips also are an easy and free-flowing conduit for pornography.
Sacramento Police child internet safety video link
Keep up to date on the latest online threats and solutions with our free newsletter.
We hate spam as much as you do. You have our guarantee that your email will not be given to anyone and that you will only receive the newsletters you are requesting.
|
|
Home Monitoring Software Child Internet Safety Filtering Software |
|
copyright Dan Greenlaw 2007 |
