The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
When I was a teenager, we used to get in trouble for passing notes in class. If you were mad at somebody, it was often up to the two of you settle it. While things could brew for a while, things never really got out of hand. Things have changed. Over the last few weeks, I have seen more stories showing up of some of the scary cyber troubles that teens are getting themselves into. There was a recent story of eight teens who were charged with luring one of their peers over to a house, where they beat her unconscious several times just so they could post the video on YouTube and gain some attention for themselves. There was another story out of the UK about children as young as nine or ten posing as pedophiles in chat rooms in order to scare their friends. The tragic story of Megan Meir, who before Christmas hung herself because of the harassment of a cyberbully who turned out to be the mother of one of her peers, has been in the news again. Finally, last week, a new report out talks about teens purposefully swapping nude pictures of themselves using their mobile phones in order to gain some attention. Each of these stories show young people out of control and whose actions will have long lasting repercussions. Along with the final story of picture swapping has been other stories of these pictures getting passed on to people who were never meant to see them, and many of them ending up online. When relationships end, people are mean and pass things along. These kinds of decisions being made by teens can cause much larger problems than any fights I might have had as a teenager. Employers, colleges and universities regularly perform Google, MySpace and Facebook searches on people they are going to involve themselves with. I know of several occasions where people have been denied entry into a university, a professional certificate after graduation, or even a job based on things that have been learned by searching online. Research shows that most parents, over 75 per cent, have very little idea of what their teens do when they are online. Many students have laptops of their own or desktop computers in their bedrooms, where they may spend hours on their own. These are the biggest dangers in online safety. Parents who are informed have (or are willing to learn) the tech skills needed to supervise their children, and having the familyÕs computers out in an open space, such as your living room or rec room, has been shown to be the greatest ways to reduce risk. Teens themselves also need to be tech savvy enough to know a few online safety basics. They need to protect all of their passwords and account information. They need not to post such things as their last names, addresses, contact information, or other information about their family or school that can be used to identify them. Finally, people need to know how all of their equipment works. They need to be able to know when their webcams are on. They need to know these commands so that they cannot be convinced to do something that will endanger themselves. The online safety of teens is an important issue that parents truly need to concern themselves with. ([email protected]) Tech Notes runs Mondays.
