The Special Case for Social Networks


Social networks provide some rich opportunities to interact and participate with others every daythink of the great people you've met through friends and family members, and through friends of your friends and their family members. This networking approach to meeting new people and enriching your life has been a good social tool for millennia. You've probably relied on the good judgment of your friends whether it was to choose a hair stylist or business partner or to be introduced to a blind date.

Taking Social Networking Online

The ability to expand your social networks in the virtual world can mirror the benefits of networking in the real world, but there are a few risks to be aware of. In the real world, when you share information with your friends, it is primarily just between the people present at the time. If a record of what happened is kept, it's in someone's journal, or a story retold. In general, the distance that offline information travels is limited, as are the ways in which it can be documented. For example, rarely are photos added to a paper journal or diary; and when do others get to read a journal and vouch for its accuracy? Essentially never. For most people, most of the time, private information remains private.

It used to be that only celebrities and politicians had to be concerned about the risk of their private lives being made public. In the online world, your private information and actions can be documented and made public, often by you. Foolish indiscretions once shared with a select group now might be shared with the whole world. Things said in a context that was well understood at the time might take on an entirely different meaning to others. And to an extent never before imaginable, the information shared on the Internet has the potential for full multimedia supporttext, images, video, audio, and corroborating documentation (others' comments that agree or comment on something)documenting your words or actions forever. In a sense, everyone who participates in public social networks is suddenly a public figure. You should consider all the implications that status carries.

Taking Control of Your Blog

Here is a process you can use to help you and your family learn how publicly available blogs can put the family at risk. Follow these steps to teach your children how to blog safely:

1.

Sit down and look at other people's blogs to find and highlight risky behavior based on what you've learned in this book. Talk about what is placing those people at risk. With this approach, the conversation isn't about your child doing something wrong. Instead it's about educating yourselves on how to spot and mitigate risks. This approach is considerably less emotionally loaded than using your child's blog as the "bad" example.

2.

Once you've reviewed together other bloggers' mistakes, you might want to move directly to reviewing your child's blog, or you might choose to establish a short grace period, such as 3 to 24 hours, in which they get to clean up their site before you review it. If you do give them a grace period, let them know that all future reviews will happen on an ad hoc basis, at your discretion.

3.

Assure them that the point of the review isn't to read every word written by them or to them. It's to ensure that their site isn't exposing information beyond the threshold your family has set. This is not just for the safety of the child who is blogging publicly. It is also to protect the entire family. If a cybercriminal knows your son's address, he also knows yours.

4.

This safety review process can vary if your childen's blogs are private or if they agree to make them private after your talk. However, you should still review and discuss their buddy lists with them. If their buddy list includes people your child has never met, you should consider the blog public, requiring a more stringent review. The knowledge that a publicly viewable site will be regularly reviewed by parents might be a strong incentive for them to keep their blog private.



Look Both Ways. Help Protect Your Family on the Internet
Look Both Ways: Help Protect Your Family on the Internet
ISBN: 0735623473
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 157
Authors: Linda Criddle

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