Hide Your Kids, Hide Your Wife

After looking through various blogs over internet safety, two definitely struck me. The first being one titled “How to Protect your Children from Internet Dangers” and the second titled “Internet dangers and how to keep your kids for staying safe”.  

Both these articles drown the reader with pathos, basically scaring the parent’s reading the articles to death with the fact that their children are going to be sexually solicited, as well as watch porn, be harassed, threatened, or even learn how to potentially kill themselves all while browsing the web. These articles may be a little over kill, especially with a claim like “the harsh reality is that the Internet is full of criminals who will stop at nothing in their attempts to exploit children in any way they can, and just by doing a simple search on Google, children can end up into inappropriate webspaces that are prime hunting grounds for extremely dangerous child predators”. The internet is full of criminals, really? I’ve been on the internet since I was about eight and have yet to come across a criminal trying to “exploit” me.

There’s also mass amounts of logos added in there through the use of statistics about the dangers of the internet, such as the amount of youth that visit adult websites either on purpose or accident, amount of Facebook users, number of pedophiles on the internet, etc. These only reinforce the fears of the parent’s reading the article that their children are going to get into something extremely inappropriate.

These articles are definitely one sided towards the internet being a horrible place full of horrible people who are only out to get the children and youth of today, and does nothing to praise the great things about the internet. Yes, there are many dangers associated with the internet, but children are being taught at young ages how to deal with these. They may be young, but they aren’t as stupid as their parents may think.

Stranger Danger

Most parents want to think their children are perfect, that they do no wrong, and that they would never be stupid enough to do something crazy like give their name, address, school, or any other identifiable information out to strangers on the internet.

I hate to be the one to break it to you, but that's just about as accurate as saying the no one under the age of 21 would ever dare try an alcoholic beverage.

          The internet makes meeting and connecting with new people way too easy. There are so many chat websites just for the sole purpose of talking to strangers, or even videoing strangers. There are even websites for young children with chat abilities, such as Club Penguin. May not have been the brightest idea on Disney's part to give young, vulnerable children the ability to chat with strangers, but that's their choice.

I will admit, I've had my fair share of internet stupidity, especially when I was young. Coke Rewards used to have a chat function when I was in sixth grade that me and my best friend at the time would get on to talk. One night though, she introduced me to a boy who claimed to be our age and from Canada named Omar. We talked to him for weeks after that, and eventually he started just talking to me by myself. He complimented me and told me how much he liked me and finally asked if he could meet me and where I lived. Luckily my older brother was there and immediately reported him and blocked him so he couldn’t get into contact with me or my friend again. Now he very well could have been a 12 year old from Canada, but then why would he want to come down to Texas to meet with some random 12 year old girl he had only talked to for about two months? Sketchy? Very, very sketchy.

Me and my roommates also use a website called Omegle to talk to random strangers from around the world that has not only a chat ability, but a video ability so you can see the strangers you're talking to. Although its technically anonymous, I can’t tell you how many times strangers on there give out way more information about themselves than necessary. It's scary how stupid and naïve some people can be when it comes to internet safety.

Think before you type. Please.

Sexual Encounters

The internet isn't just a topic of interest for the common man, but researches and analysists as well. A recent study by three Doctors, Kimberly J. Mitchell Ph.D., Janis Wolak J.D., and David Finkelhor Ph.D., was over the dangers of the internet in terms of sexual exploitations/solicitations, harassment and other unwanted sexual contact for youth while on the internet.

I found this scholarly article by searching through various articles over the dangers of the internet on Google Scholar, and after I verified that it was an actual study by at least one doctor and had all the required parts in the article, I deemed it suitable.

The main point was that they wanted to track the trends from 2000 to 2005 of sexual solicitations and unwanted porn that were being exposed to youth on the internet. They found that although the internet is in fact developing more and more every day since it came into existence, and more and more is being added to its vast amount of information, there is actually a decline in the amount of sexual solicitations on the internet by youth overall, especially with boys and girls of all ages and of non-Hispanic culture and wealthy homes, but there is no significant decrease for less wealthy households and minorities.

From these results, they concluded that the decrease in white, richer homes was due to there being more education available in schools and at home for these children on how to be safe while on the internet and what can happen, resulting in them being more careful with what they do, and from this there needs to be increased efforts for minorities and less wealthy youth to teach them how to avoid the dangers of the internet and how to make safe choices with what they do while online.

This article definitely drives home how the internet has changed over the years since it first came into existence, and although more intense and harmful things are being put on the internet for our children to get into, children are also more aware of these facts at a younger age and how exactly they should go about reacting to these situations. The fact of the matter is is that these children were born into these dangers and already know how to deal with them better than some of the adults of today do.

Creeping like Champs

So here’s a riddle for you: what's the biggest oxymoron you can think of?

Give up? How about privacy on the internet.


You may think that you live in your own little world on the internet; that everything you do and say is only seen by your friends and family. I mean, who else would possibly care about what you do or say on Facebook or forums, right?

Jokes on you- a lot of people.

Many people joke about the term Facebook stalking, most of us with an account do it quite frequently, whether between classes, when we should be studying, at night before bed, it’s just something we do. But what we put on Facebook, and what people “creep” about us on there, is scarier than most of us are willing to admit. The Facebook administrators do their best to keep the privacy settings at the highest levels possible to keep all of our information as private as we want it to be, but in reality, you’re still putting information about yourself on the world wide web, and how private can that really be?

I had the perfect example of this arise tonight actually. My roommate is an adamant Facebook user who adds friends she meets at school and work, updates her status daily, posts new pictures from parties and what not, and she makes the mistake everyday she gets on there that what she puts up there is private, just like most all of us do. She was hit in the face by this fact today when she received a call from her boyfriend saying that her pictures had been taken off of her Facebook and posted on a local gossip site called The Dirty. When she went to look at it, she saw that some guy she had met in a class at school had taken four of her pictures and submitted them asking for what the gossip writer thought of her. People commented horribly nasty comments on her pictures that literally brought her to tears. When we looked into what we could do about it, we came up with absolutely nothing. The pictures were technically fair game since she put them up on Facebook by her own free will and what the people were saying about it was just an opinion, not necessarily defamation of character or anything that serious.

It just goes to show you, you never know whose watching what you do on the internet, and you never know just how safe you are with what you put out there about your own private life.