The internet is changing every day!
Yes, the internet is changing ever day! Which is great, we now live in a digital world, this allows us to see everything we want to, we use the web to find information anywhere at anytime, It allows innovation to be expressed in all areas by anyone. At Master Mobile - we love the internet, lets face it - without it, would our company even have such demand for it's product and services ?
We are always excited to see new apps and features that use the internet to perform. Remote services, smart features in our homes and cars, social media, games and much much more. When you think of it now, more and more things in our lives are controlled online everyday!
Whilst we are here enjoying all of these great features that the web has to offer, do we ever stop and consider the dangers ? Although the internet does not present a direct danger - it does allow room for deception. Let's make an example and use a popular gaming platform to study the point here.
For Legal reasons, we will not name this platform however we have to name it something, so.. Let's Say ''Rublux''
Rublux game has now been released, 1,000's of people of all ages have now signed up. The games are great fun, they also have this great feature called chat. They have a series of games to play with so many people playing at any one time - its fun, exciting and in a lot of cases educational. The game creators have done a fabulous job, not only on the game development but the features and security on the game is the maximum it could possibly be. However - like most things there are security issues that we face created by people with not such good intentions. There is only so much game developers, content creators and software engineers can do to prevent bad behaviour online - We are unable to put all of the responsibility onto these people to keep our children safe, there is lots of little things that we as parents can do, we don't need to be computer literate to the highest level!
How can we tighten the security around our children online?
Whilst we like to believe that everyone we meet is as great as us, trustworthy and don't have any bad intention in their mind, this is untrue and I think we know that! If we were asked to leave our child alone in a park with strangers, we would never do it. But, without realising we are doing this almost everyday online. People who do have bad intentions have the ability to talk to our children, get to know them and become a ''friend'' to our children.
They can become so friendly that they can give and receive advice, make plans to meet online, move to other platforms and make plans to meet in real life. This is where the possible problems occur. What if the person is not who they say they are? What if this puts our child in immediate danger?
The simple things to make changes are as follows.
- Have a conversation with your children, explain to them about the dangers. Ask them to let you know if they talk to anyone regularly who they do not know in real life. (We should continue to ask this throughout the relevant time)
- Regularly check the content your child is viewing online
- Make sure that your child is aware of the security measures they can take to stay safe online. (See The Additional Information Below)
- Be sure to hold conversations about what your child has been doing online, discuss what they have done, what they have achieved.
To see more information on how to keep you children safe online you can visit https://www.gov.uk/government/groups/uk-council-for-child-internet-safety-ukccis
