I recently read in the news that a Roman Catholic high school in Sparta have ordered its students to remove personal blogs from the Internet in the name of protecting them from cyber predators.
This makes perfect sense to me and I applaud the principle for the action that he is taking. The Internet is a “Gateway” which leads the adult predator to our children. Parents need to recognize the better need to monitor their children’s online activity,
Websites like xanga, myspace, and livejournal, make it all too easy for sexual predators to prey on our children.
Children are vulnerable and they don’t realize that anyone can and most likely are reading their blog entries. It is up to us as parents to educate them and monitor their online activity.
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3 responses so far ↓
Devrie
// Aug 10, 2007 at 10:12 pm
There is a danger, I’ve noticed, on MySpace that might seem very innocent…but…
You know those memes you get every so often? Well, on social networking sites, such as MySpace, they proliferate like mad, and many of them may have alterior motives.
In many ways, you can get some “survey,” that asks all sorts of juvenille questions. And, when you’re bored, and interested in being creative in answering these questions, you might not think of the dangers associated with answering them.
…after all, you aren’t giving away your address, your phone number, or your social security (or social insurance) number away!
….but, let’s say there’s someone interested in you in your community, and they “befriend” you on your blog. Say, they’re interested in poetry or your blog posts…
They might know what town you live in, because it’s posted on you’re profile. They might know that you live in the suburbs, because you wrote a blog entry about “life in the cul-de-sac corner.”
…so then, they send you a “cute” little survey, with which you are free do fill out and repost for everyone else to see and fill out: Questions such as:
what color is your room?
What were you doing last night at midnight?
Do you have any pets?
Can you drive a stick shift?
—
These questions seem innocent, but really, think about it. If someone wants to invade your home, they may now whether you have dogs that might bark; which room is actually yours; whether you go out at night; or whether you can regain control of a car if they want to take you somewhere in a standard shift car.
Be very careful!!
I am an advocate of teaching kids the ropes, though. I don’t think you can keep kids away from Internet sites, but there is an appropriate age group for allowing certain types of blogging and social networking online. Teenagers, especially, might want to do this, but there need to be restrictions on which sites they can visit; what types of privacy setting they must have; and how they present themselves online (which sould be, really, that they DON’T present themselves online).
In other words, allowing teens to have blogs and so forth, is fine, but they should be as anonymous as possible. —but they should realize that they may need to restrict their friends comments too!! …because strange folks will use friends identities to gather information about them too.
Devrie
// Aug 10, 2007 at 10:14 pm
Wow, I didn’t realize how long that was and how full of typo’s it was! It’s a mess. Sorry about that.
Rose DesRochers
// Aug 11, 2007 at 12:11 am
Devrie, you point out something important. I don’t think I gave this much thought myself. As you know both my children have a blog and they blog on occasion. They don’t spend much time on the internet and when they are on, we closely monitor them. Those survey my friends can be fun, but I understand the personal risk that could be involved with giving out too much info.
PS: Don’t worry about the typos. I make enough myself.
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