Protecting Your Children From Internet Threats

Now that you have more than one computer in your home, and your children have to be on the internet for extended periods of time, you’ll need to do all you can to protect your family from internet threats.

One Of The Biggest Internet Threats Is Cyber Bullying

Cyber-bullying is becoming quite common among middle and high school students, and these threats can be very serious.

Here are a few ways that you can protect your child from internet threats, as well as some software that will prohibit unauthorized users from gaining access to your computer.

Social Networks Are Also Becoming Internet Threats To Your Children

Internet threats are very common on social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook and even Twitter. You may even place YouTube into this category due to the nature of some the videos that can be viewed.

Teenagers have accounts on these sites, which means that millions of people around the world have access to some of their personal information.

You’ll need to make sure that your teenager is not posting a number of personal pictures on the site; there are a number of young girls that place suggestive pictures on these social networking sites, and this makes it easier for internet predators and pedophiles to get in touch with your children and learn their whereabouts.

These sites also make it easy for your child’s fellow students to get in touch with them in order to make internet threats; some of the things that are said in the online messages that your child is receiving can be quite troubling, and many of these students will make good on these threats once your son or daughter arrives at school.

So How Can Your Prevent These  Internet Threats

In order to prevent internet threats, you may need to get your child’s school involved in keeping your child safe. If the online threats are made on school computers, your child’s principle will need to get involved in order to incorporate more internet safety features on campus computers.

If the internet threats happen off-campus, schools may be sued for violating the student’s right to free speech, so be sure to discuss the right methods for prevention with your school’s administration.

Your child also needs to know that they can come to you to let you know if they are receiving internet threats. You should have access to your child’s MySpace or Facebook account so that you can monitor the activity, and it may help to keep the computer your child uses in a common area of the house so that you can stay aware of the conversations he or she is having on the internet.

It is also a good idea to make sure that your child stays away from forums and chat rooms; these are some of the common places that people of all ages receive internet threats, and your child could be at risk if you are not keeping up with their internet activity.

The first step in combating internet threats is to install a good internet security program such as AVG Internet Security.