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Top Tips on Using Technology to Protect Yourself

How you use a product can be as important as what product you use. Here's my best advice on how to fit technology tools into your plan for Internet safety:

  • Understand what your family is comfortable with. Before you begin to experiment with the various programs and settings that are available to help protect you online, keep in mind that tools enable you to create the online environment you feel is appropriate. These programs typically offer various levels of settings. For example, a high level of content filtering would restrict a large number of sites, while a low level would allow more types of content through. Before you begin to make settings and install software, talk to your family and consider what the trade-offs are. If you leave your settings at the lower level of filtering, less "good" material will be blocked, but potentially more "bad" material might get through. How will you adjust your settings and standards as you and your children age? Being thoughtful about which tools you use and how you use them will have an impact on how rewarding and appropriate your online experience is. To help guide you in age-appropriate Internet usage, Microsoft has partnered with the American Association of Pediatrics to provide a guide to recommended levels of filtering by age group. To learn more about the AAP guidelines, go to www.aap.org/healthtopics/mediause.cfm.

  • Understand the capabilities of your mobile phone and of your child's mobile phone. Talk to your carrier about what safety measures they have enabled. Consider the services available to you and your children and enable only the ones you feel are appropriate. More advanced phones can now be infected with malware. Talk with your cellular company about what risks might be associated with your phone and what you should do to protect your devices from viruses and spyware. For the youngest users (7- to 12-year-olds), limited-functionality phones, such as Firefly and those from Disney Mobile, have been launched in some markets. These phones provide restricted contacts, fewer buttons, and full parental controls.

  • Look for advanced filtering features. Check to see if your filtering program will route e-mail alerts to you when your child tries to access a restricted site and needs your permission. If you travel for your job, you might want to look for a product that offers remote reporting and management. With these features, you can check on what's happening at home from anywhere in the world and even change configuration settings remotely. Some products offer a dynamic filtering feature that allows site access when the content is not objectionable (for example, a news site that changes its feature articles throughout the day) and blocks it when there is objectionable content.



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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