Internet Web Safety 101 for Parents

Currently The news reports have been filled with reports about children and teens signing up to become part of different online internet communities. Understand that re-legislating laws alone cannot and will not protect our children and teens from web predators. As parents we need to become aware of the potential dangers that exist for our children and even ourselves on the web. Child Preditors go where the child go and that includes the internet. We need t, while your children are young educate them as to the pot falls of theinternet and more importantly the effects such exposure will have on them as teens and adults.

To understand the importance of educating our children at a young age, we must first acknowledge that www stands for the WORLD WIDE WEB. World means the whole world not just our local community neighborhood. Our generation grew up with local community "boards" often run by neighborhood associations and other respectable people local to our community. To post or view contents of those boards we had our modems dial directly to their remote computer usually located in a neighbor's home. Relatively safe. We could post funny videos up and and they weren't ranked in popularity based on the extreme and sometimes on the humilation of innocent people. Those days have been gone for a long long time. Now everyone and anyone can belong to any Blog or photo album community where our children and teens are creating wonderful pages, which include many innocent pictures of your child having fun with other friends. Now children are competing on YouTube for the most hits of their videos. This effects the socialization of youth in ways that the schools and parents will suffer the effects from for years. And Remember when it comes to community based webpages like MySpace and FaceBook, anyone in the WORLD at any time can belong to the same Web community even while they're in jail.

"But my child's page on MYSPACE / Facebook is password protected and you have to be a friend to view her Blog"

• >So it's protected you say.


• The tools available to *********** ** **** *** ******* ** ***** **** ******* are available to everyone for free. They can be easily accessed through the web to get into your child's site. Honest people often use these tools for their intended use, but predators also know about and use these tools to gain access into what appears to be secure content on your child's MySPace/ and Facebook accounts

"But they won't be able to find my daughter, she used a phony address and state of residence..."

• >Really, you don't say.


• It doesn't take much to find out where an ***** ****** resolves to (Every Computer and service provider has one- (even yours). So regardless of what state your child says they are from when they sign up, it doesn't take but a novice to find out what city she lives in. That information as well as content including Photo's taken from their Blog is all a web predator needs to stalk your child or pass the information on to another preditor in the area. Yes even preditors have their network connections world wide

The most worrisome aspect of the Community Social Networking websites such as MySPace, and FaceBook, is that there are image indexing (robots) that will actually search all the pages of all websites including social networking websites and they will pull out all the images they find password protected or not. Haven't you ever wondered where all those images come from on Google Images, MSN, Yahoo Image searches. Anyway the search engines I just mentioned at least follow robot.txt directions so if your teen is crafty enough they can block those "bots" from pulling images off their MySpace Pages and facebook pages . But as we said on the main page of the safety section, for every good site their are hundreds of bad. There are many "bots" that don't follow the disallow or no index no follow instructions in robot.txt files and they will grab all the photos from your child's site for all the world to see. Well then they are posted to that sites website and are then re-index legitimately by the top search engines and are spread again around the world. Scary isn't it.

• We Setup a MySpace account and Posted pictures of trees. We gave the images names that were very unique just to see What happens to the photos. It only took a month for the not so good "bots" to grab the images and it only took another week after that for the images to be found on MSN, Google , and Yahoo. Of course when following where the indexed photos came from it was traced to a site that has a bad "bot" and that site led us right back to our MySpace page. This was with a New Myspace account. With older accounts the "bots" regularly visit looking for new photos.



Who cares right they are just photos. Are your children wearing school uniforms or sweatshirts with the school logo or other identifying information. And of course the image search results tell the original Community based, Myspace, or FaceBook account it came from. And using techniques discussed above they can gain access. And just based on the photos alone it wouldn't take much for someone to find out where that school is located. If the preditor wasn't local, what is to stop them from contacting their network of creepies about their find.




In a perfect world the information super highway would be super. Unfortunately our world is not perfect; it is marred with many predators and opportunities for them to thrive.

Coming Soon More Web Safety Information on:

Web Sites

• It's 7pm. Parents do you know what beach your children are surfing on the internet? -
• What do you mean net nanny won't protect my child from everything?
• How to configure you browser to go to parent approved sites only.

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