This article has been adapted and updated from Chapter 7 of Janette Blackwell's 2006 e-book, Internet Predators On The Prowl!
The Internet is both dangerous and wonderful. You've heard about some of the dangers. Now look at some of the online materials that will help keep you and your family safe:
Pornography Filter
Some of the best things really are free. For example, Google's SafeSearch will keep web pages containing explicit sexual content from appearing in search results, and it's absolutely free. Go to
Click on Preferences. Once there you can choose strict filtering, which filters both explicit text and explicit images. Or you can choose moderate filtering, which filters out explicit images only.
But of course that's only the first step in keeping your child safe online.
When Your Children Are Very Young
The KidRocket KidSafe Web Browser is a good way for your child to learn about the Internet. The browser will go only to the hand picked websites programmed into it. And it's free. Click below to check out the list of selected sites and decide if it's a good fit for your family.
The Child Safety Network offers free help of many kinds to parents. Do take them up on it.
You'll also find excellent material from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children on several child safety sites, including the Net Smartz Workshop listed below.
On the Safe Kids site the Center gives excellent guidance to you as a parent:
http://www.safekids.com/child_safety.htm
The Net Smartz Workshop can be used online just for you and your family, or it can be downloaded for group use.
Cyber bullies, who intimidate through such things as e-mail, instant messages, and cell phones, have found online new scope for an age-old practice. Here's a good site for children or adults with that problem:
http://www.uscert.gov/cas/tips/ST06-005.html
Chat Danger tells children about dangers of chat rooms, mobile phones, etc. Check to see if it's at your child's reading level:
When Your Child Is Older
The Internet has thousands of websites that offer entertainment and educational resources for children. There are even search engines for children! How can a parent decide which are best?
Start with Ivyjoy. Ivy's Search Engine Resources lists search engines for children, web guides for children, and much more. But don't assume that you, as a parent, will agree with everything on these web guides simply because they're "selective." Most do NOT include controversial material on religious and social issues, but some do. And occasionally a website that was safe changes its focus and is not longer suitable. So check out any you plan to use. Is this the material that you want your child to read? If not, keep looking, because amazing resources are out there, and I think you will like a good deal of what you find.
http://www.ivyjoy.com/rayne/kidssearch.html
Your child will also enjoy this site, devoted to educational games for kids from kindergarten through eighth grade:
Though, once again, you will want to check out the offerings, especially the movie reviews. If you don't like the reviews, try this website for parents, which rates movies' profanity, nudity, sex, violence, and drugs-alcohol using easy-to-read graphs:
They Really Are After Your Kids
You wouldn't allow a family member to walk alone in a dangerous neighborhood. Unfortunately, some parts of the Internet have become dangerous neighborhoods, and children and teens need you to walk them through the procedure for getting out of one unscathed. Criminal hackers lurk around sites young people favor, waiting to capture their computers and through them gain access to the family's credit information. At some deeply toxic sites, hackers can put spyware onto your child's computer even if he or she doesn't click on anything! This is especially true if the child is using a computer without all its browser patches.
So kids and teens need all the protections listed in the article, "Your Suit Of Shining Armor," along with those browser patches. And let me give an extra boost to some of the most important:
1) McAfee Site Advisor.
As of this writing, this top-ranked antispyware warning system is free. McAfee plans to make it a centerpiece of its Falcon protection suites, so I don't know how much longer it will have a free version. I keep going to its site and nervously checking it out, because no child or adult should go online without it or its equivalent.
Site Advisor warns about toxic sites, spammers, and dangerous popups. One of its best features is its visibility. Many security devices claim to warn of shady sites, but their devices are hard to spot.
Site Advisor is obvious. Its button is green for okay sites and turns red for dangerous sites. The button may be in the top right-hand corner or the lower right-hand corner of the computer screen, but it sticks right out, and your child or teen can learn to glance at it often when going from site to site - and always when encountering a popup ad.
Site Advisor works with Google, and when you or your child do a Google search, the results will show green checks for okay sites, red danger signs for dangerous ones.
Because a deeply toxic site can infest within minutes, whether or not links are clicked on, teach your family to exit from a red-button site promptly by hitting the back arrow. Do NOT click on the X of a popup, and do NOT click on anything at an infested site. Either action can infest. Simply back out rapidly using the back arrow - or, lacking a back arrow, exit from the situation completely with Alt+F4. Alt+F4 is especially good for people of all ages to know about, because it is so easy to get into a sticky situation online, and Alt+F4 whooshes in and takes you completely out of that window.
Let me give an example of what can happen. Recently I was poking around the United Media comics website - a perfectly legitimate site that features the characters of comic strips United Media owns. It's also a site attractive to children. I clicked on Store and suddenly got a popup ad about "free ring tones." And my Site Advisor button went from green to red. Which means danger! I immediately clicked the back arrow, went back to the main page, and the button went back to green. Clicked on Store a second time and got the genuine United Media store, with nothing about free ring tones. The Site Advisor light stayed green. (And if you got the impression that "free ring tones" can be bad news, you're absolutely right. Any time you see an expensive banner or popup ad for something that's free, like ring tones or emoticons, there is a fair likelihood of a criminal hacker hiding in the underbrush, ready to make you the next victim.)
Now, I don't know if that hacker is still lurking around the same store, but he was the last three times I visited. So, once you have McAfee Site Advisor, you might pay it a visit and see. If you get a red-flagged popup, for free ring tones or anything else, it will serve as an example when you teach your child how to back away from popups. You can find the store by clicking below. (And let me say once again that this site is perfectly okay . . . except for what's hiding in the underbrush. Online criminals really do target children.)
http://www.unitedmedia.com/comics/index.html
And if, after all this buildup, Site Advisor still doesn't strike you, or if McAfee starts charging for its services, you'll find listed in "Your Suit Of Shining Armor" other software that does similar things.
2) Antispyware.
You'll also find in the article, "Your Suit Of Shining Armor," listings of top-notch yet inexpensive antispyware that you should run frequently, to get rid of spyware before it can harm you or your family. I'm careful in my browsing habits, but my researches do take me to a lot of websites, and I am perpetually astonished at the tracking cookies I pick up! (Ordinary cookies are fine by me, but no one wants the kind of cookie that tracks everything you do.) My SpySweeper antispyware finds them and quarantines them, for which I am profoundly grateful. And every once in awhile, SpySweeper lets me know it's fended off something worse than a tracking cookie, for which I am even more grateful.
Your antispyware can't find spyware, however, unless you do a scan! Most antispyware will allow you to schedule regular scans for the wee hours of the morning, when you are asleep, and this is a good policy.
3) Browser Patches.
They sound so boring, these Microsoft patches, yet over a million people - mostly kids - who were reportedly infested because they were in the vicinity of a MySpace ad with hidden spyware, did so because they hadn't applied a certain patch to their browser. They didn't even have to click on anything to get the spyware! You see, when Microsoft announces a patch, the criminals say, "Whoopee! There's a hole in Internet Explorer and most people are not going to bother to get a patch for it!" And they tailor a spyware attack just for that unpatched hole. So, if you use Internet Explorer, save your child and your family from an infestation of spyware by going right now to
http://www.microsoft.com/athome/security/update/bulletins/automaticupdates.mspx
Sign up there for automatic patches and, while you're there, download any patches you don't have.
If Microsoft won't give you patches because you use Windows 98, "Your Suit Of Shining Armor" will describe other ways to safeguard your computer.
And do consider the virtues of installing an alternative browser such as Firefox.
What's with MySpace.com anyway?
Sites such as MySpace, Facebook, and Friendster, which make it easy to set up an individual page and communicate with friends, are used by millions of middle school and high school students. What really happens on these sites? One eighth grade teacher, Cheryl MacPherson of Alexandria, Virginia, decided to find out. She set up her own MySpace account, created her own page, and began communicating with the kids in her class. She was shocked by reckless postings that made them ripe targets for sexual predators. She says, "I would not condone any 14- or 15-year-old living alone in an apartment and driving a car. So why do we allow these children to lead independent lives online?" She thinks parents should have their own MySpace pages, link with friends of their children, post comments, and read bulletins. It's called taking back the land.
And here's the MySpace address, in case you want to get involved:
Then again, even that level of involvement may not be enough. Turns out that Zango, a sneaky form of spyware, did a pretty good job of infiltrating MySpace, putting malicious spyware into seemingly innocent downloads - one of which said it would "protect kids from predators." See the blog post by Suzi Turner here:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Spyware/?p=842
If you follow Suzi Turner's links back you'll see that, although Zango spyware is now officially out of MySpace, this malicious spyware is still circulating from one teen to another.
And Zango isn't limiting its spyware to teens. Take what Zango did recently on the Warner Bros. website for children. It hid pornograpic spyware in downloads aimed at young children. A person could only find out about the pornography by reading all the fine print. And what child reads all the fine print?
Read the report at:
Being with friends online is tremendously important to kids these days, and if you don't feel you can deprive your child or teen of the MySpace experience - or deprive a younger child of children's sites that promote products, as does the Warner Bros. site - here are some options:
1) Make a hard-and-fast rule that NOTHING is downloaded unless you have read through all the fine print in the terms of the agreement, where any mention of "adult materials" will be buried;
(2) Make sure the browser used by your child or teen has all its Microsoft patches so it won't be infested by simply being in the vicinity of ads with hidden spyware;
3) Make sure the computer has the Big Five protections, as detailed in the article, "Your Suit of Shining Armor": good brands of antispyware and antivirus, a firewall, the patches I just mentioned, and the McAfee Site Advisor;
4) See that no financial information, social security numbers, passwords, etc., are on this computer; and
5) If purchases are made using this computer, use a low-limit credit card (NEVER a debit card). In fact, if possible, use the one low-limit credit card for all your family's online purchases.
Yes, I know this sounds like a lot to do, but think how much time and money it will take if you have to replace your computer or reformat its hard drive, as millions have done in order to get rid of particularly nasty spyware. And then figure how much a stolen identity would cost you in time and money.
The above suggestions are really ones you should implement for all your computers, not just a computer used by a child, and they will save you trouble and expense in the long run.
If you don't feel that even these options are sufficient, you can always move to:
Parental Control Software
The Open Directory, otherwise known as "dmoz," has an edited list of some of the best, and you will find that there are an amazing number of them. Find the listing at
http://dmoz.org/Computers/Software/Shareware/Windows/Security/Parental_Control/
And I leave the choice to you, where it belongs.
Want To Read More About This Online?
For the latest newspaper articles on spyware dangers, try Topix.net's Spyware News. Terrible things are going on, but, as always, news from the battlefront holds a strange fascination.