Protect Your Kids From Predators–An Online Guide For Parents

Parents have no idea what their kids are doing online.

Tyler Cohen Wood

David Clarke Founder of GDPR Technology Group on LinkedIn, Data Protection – Cyber Sec Expert.

We discussed how to protect your kids online

Covering the following: –

Child friendly spyware, friends houses, mobile phone data, very little control, hope for the best, most systems are not designed
to have the parental oversight.

Age verification, adult games, payments online accounts. Kids useage of electronic money. When kids are out and about, social media accounts
need to be setup with parents, instead of kids being left to do their own thing.

Most parents think that learning cyber sec is overwhelming, but better to sit with their children to go through passwords etc.
Online boundaries.

Do you recommend having passwords to all of the kids accounts?

Manage Apple or Google store accounts, then Apple put another layer of protection in place.

Bill protection is now in place.

Child friendly routers, David explains information security by setting up rules for users, with seperate passwords etc.

Child passwords and keeping peace in the household is very difficult. Internal pressures make it very difficult.

WhatsApp group at school, picture in the user group with a funny picture, how serious are these?

How do you know strange people are not in the private chat groups. Kids get together and manage the groups, they are smarter
than we give them credit.

Do you recommend talking to your kids about the unusual conversations and people within groups.

Most threats in people’s minds are people in other countries.
But in fact 80% is peer to peer family members and other children.
Best way is to monitor conversations to prevent harm!

Would you advise parents go through the children’s phone and discuss which applications are on the phone and what they do?

The major way to handle this is to tell them stories about other things that have happened online.

Best way is to tell them the consequences from their actions.

You need to learn each piece of software and the risks that can occur from applications.

Don’t allow pictures of your kids on the internet.

Checklists for kids, what to do if you are being bullied or if you don’t know what to do in certain situations.

What are things that adults can do online to ensure the safety of their kids?
I made an effort to learn what programs to use, how to secure certain devices.
Conversation with the kids as well to explain what could happen.

Parents have no idea what their kids are doing online.

What can you do as a parent to be more comfortable with what they are doing?
Mobile phones, low data tarif, home wifi is helpful ISPs have a family safety option.

Secure DNS on their equipment to prevent some of the nasty sites
Pre-emt conversations about kids with problems and how people overcame them
Having subtle conversations with them about potential problems.

The older they get the less and less control you have.

Parents will have control over childrens’ technology once the new legislation comes in.

Keep your eyes and ears open for potential problems.

Listen to conversations and understand as much as possible as what is going on.
You can restrict behaviours of children but be aware as to what is happening is key.

Educating kids how to manage communications.

Make sure children need to understand when to message people or call them.
With phones, make sure the messages and calls are controlled.
Ensuring the digital overload is not taking over their lives.

Managing the effects from dopamine is crucial.

This isn’t just about kids being safe but parent protecting kids.
Parents should also be careful when posting pictures of kids.
Advertisements and trackers can collect data outside the applications
Difficult to control information that is out there on what we are searching for online.

Vulnerable adults can cause many of these problems, I am not sure who is vulnerable, in the digital world it all falls apart.

Monitoring emails does happen, compromised emails and people that don’t look after their vulnerabilities are part of the problem.

If letting your kids use Google, you setup the password reset goes to your account, go into the back of the account ensure your child is not being
followed around the internet.

Regulation and legislation is coming and this will be brilliant to ensure safety.

Give kids more credit for being smart about these things, encourage they go to the parent if these problems occur.

One of the mistakes we make as security professionals, we assume what people are learning is for when people are at their best
and predators are targeting kids and adults especially right now.

What would you advise people to do when they are feeling overwhelmed?
Stress and worry can lower your thinking capability, take one thing at a time, try and make things as safe as possible.

Mobile phone operators claim they don’t know there phones are going to children.

Quite often head teachers can spend a day a week taking care of gaming problems.

And telling your children off is not a good idea as they won’t contact you again about it.

Feel free to reach out to David about creating a strategy.

In addition reachout to Tyler via the contact us page, she is giving one lucky person a copy of her book and feel free contact David Clarke on LinkedIn

Keep things simple.

Catching the Catfishers

We are giving away a free copy of Tyler’s book Catching the Catfishers, please drop us a message and we will arrange for you.

Thanks so much for listening and taking an interest in influential visions podcast and our new security series coming up.

If you work from home remotely here is a good solution that will enable you to take control of your network. LuJam Cyber Protection.

Alternatively ask Google for remote computer control children and a number of solutions will appear.

In addition please look for Apple devices and whether they are covered if you go with remote computer control as I know some are covered and some are not.