Children and the Internet

Many people, including parents and teachers, are concerned about how using the internet can harm children. Here are some tips for reducing the risks. The main risk is that children will spend too long on the computer, so you may like to set time limits and be willing to enforce them.

Email and Instant Messaging

Very popular among children. Some said:

• “I like emails from my friends telling me what they are going to do.”


• “If I see an email bigger than 150 kilobytes, I just know it's going to be rubbish.”

Email can carry viruses, chain letters, scams, or simply junk. Never open an attachment unless you are sure it is safe. If in doubt, scan attachments with a virus scanner (with an up to date list of viruses). Viruses can send email which appear to be from friends. Chain letters can be troublesome especially if they promise that harm will come to the recipient unless they forward the email to others. Encourage children to delete these without hesitation.

Chat Rooms

Less popular. Typical experience:

• “I tried a chat room but it was rubbish. I couldn't understand what everyone was talking about.”

Children should never reveal their real identity to people they meet in a chat room and should never arrange to meet anyone from a chat room for the first time without being accompanised by a parent. They should not ask anyone else for their real identity.

Search Engines

Useful for homework, but sometimes you find more than you wanted:

• “Searching at school came up with racist and porn sites, but we didn't go into them.”

Filtering programs reduce the risks of accessing inappropriate sites, but such software needs to be kept up to date as new sites are added to the internet. Parental controls can be used, but you have to intervene whenever the child wants to access a new site. Also, children may access the internet using friends' computers, so the best defence is to make sure that if a child sees anything that they feel uncomfortable about, they should close the program and discuss what they have seen with you. Situating computers in public rooms or hallways rather than in bedrooms makes it easier to keep an eye on what children are looking at.

Gaming

Many an hour idled away and not only by children!

Apart from the risk of addiction and wasting time, free games sometimes contain viruses or pests. Viruses, as the name suggests, propagate themselves to other computers and may also delete or modify the contents of a hard drive. The only protective measure, apart from regularly using a virus scanner, is to use a less popular operating system such as Linux or MacOS X or some of the more antiquated versions of Windows such as Windows 98 as these are less susceptible to viruses.

Pests can track your usage of internet sites to target you for sales, capture credit card details, display inappropriate “pop-up” advertisements, or even dial premium rate telephone numbers without your permission. You can reduce the risk of pests by regularly running a pest scanner (see e.g. spybot which is free). If you connect to the internet via a modem, you can avoid the risk of a rogue dialler running up a large bill by asking your telephone company to block premium rate numbers. The risk can be reduced further by using broadband and eliminated altogether by cable broadband. It is also wise to run a firewall (see e.g. the free one from zonelabs) to prevent hackers gaining access to your computer while you are connected to the internet.

Conclusion

After reading this, you may feel that the risks of children using the internet outweigh the benefits, but responsible internet use will be a useful skill when they grow up.

For further information, see for instance KidShield.com.