Teaching the importance of privacy to children

With the emergence of web 2.0 has come the opportunity for anyone to contribute to what was being said on the Internet. Web 2.0 has made it easy for people to be a part of different communities where they make friends and maintain friends. Once you use these technologies you can become interconnected to people on the Internet. Talking with them everyday, or maybe just seeing their tweets or status updates and likewise with them and you.

As with any friends you talk a lot and put a lot of information online. These days it seems everyone is part of some social networking site. It becomes easy to want to share your information with friends or even family online. There is one major underlining concern when your children do this. What are they going to share? “Stolen innocence: Child identity theft” an article by bankrate.com says that over 5% of identity thefts reported to the Federal Trade Commission in 2005 were of people under the age of 18 and the number was growing. Children’s identity thefts are on the rise because it goes unnoticed until the child tries to establish credit. This gives the thief a much longer time with the stolen identity then he would have if he stole an adult’s identity.

Children when using these technologies don’t think about the predators that are all over the Internet waiting for personal information to surface that they can use. That is why it is essential for parents to go over with their children what is and isn’t acceptable to share online and how public what they are posting truly is. Teach them how to avoid phishing? Phishing is were predators fish for personal information about potential victims. Once predators get your information they can use it for anything they want from stealing your identity to flaming.

Privacy is the biggest concern when worrying about your children posting information on the Internet. Loss of privacy is a very bad thing as we found out several weeks ago when we read the article “Privacy and Technology” by Gary T. Marx. One of the reasons privacy is good, that the article gives, is that privacy is necessary for the American ideal of a fresh start. When you lose this people know more about you and it makes it impossible to completely start fresh.

Posting things online is not the only way media on the Internet can get people in trouble. In the last little while a news story came out about the craigslist killer. A man in debt used craigslist to get into peoples’ apartments were he then tied them up, raped, robbed, and in one case killed them. With all these new medias it is never too early to start teaching your child about how to view and use new media safely.