I have been shocked recently on a few subreddits where people claiming to be minors seem to give their info to strangers. Everytime I comment please don’t do that. Honestly I’m worried.
I have been shocked recently on a few subreddits where people claiming to be minors seem to give their info to strangers. Everytime I comment please don’t do that. Honestly I’m worried.
Comments
I do not think this is happening and I think it’s very dangerous. I will be sure to teach this to my kids, although right now they are both too young to getting on the internet at all.
Not at all. It seems most kids (and probably most adults) have very little idea how to use the internet either safely or intelligently.
Most people younger than age 30 or so are hyperparanoid about remaining as anonymous as they possibly can on the Internet. It’s a very interesting reversal from the 00s when it was just expected that you could easily find anybody’s real name and picture on social media and you were behind the times if you weren’t online in that way.
They did a little bit when I was a kid, but that was back in 2000s. After elementary school I did not see any Internet safety advice at all. Today I think kids don’t even get the small amount of Internet safety lessons I got back in school.
This is something parents would have to do. And/or through trial and error by the kids themselves.
Is it happening, though? Not enough, but I assume it could be worse. Too many parents lazily throw a screen in front of their kids and call that a day.
No. Not only do I think oversharing potentially sensitive information is far too common, I don’t think enough people of all age groups stop and question what they’re reading online.
When the internet was new and “scary” most parents drilled into us not to speak to strangers online or meet up with people from the internet. Social media involving strangers was a BIG no-go. Even if it was just MySpace, a lot of parents were opposed to the idea that their child’s picture and information was openly on display on the internet.
25 years later, and with lots of social desensitization, the internet is no longer perceived as the wild west.
Unfortunately, that means some people aren’t cautious enough anymore and let their (young) children browse the internet with little to no guardrails.
No. I think gen z is worse off than the boomers with media literacy.
It’s a horse to water situation. We teach Internet safety in the school I work in, they still don’t listen.
I think most kids are taught it, not so confident it’s taught “properly”. What I think is the bigger problem, however, is that I don’t think most parents are properly taught internet safety.
I consider myself pretty internet savvy, and I went to a seminar on internet safety for kids and ended up being quite surprised at how little I know.
Absolutely not. There isn’t any sort of formal education in any type of media literacy, nevermind how to navigate the Internet.
if you’re getting internet safety info, it’s coming from your parents, and that’s it.
There are lots of unsupervised kids whose parents don’t care about them and there always will be.
Do you remember the TV asking you where your kids are?
The kids know they’re just often in circumstances where they don’t care and they’re kids so the consequences escape them.
I’m 23, and when I was in middle school, we got internet safety training. It did focus primarily on giving out personal information to stranger. Definitely did not stop me from being 12 and talking to 30 year olds on Omegle chat though (at least I didn’t give out personal information)
Do kids even take a “computer” class anymore?
I did in the late 90s.
Oh heck no
The amount of young adults I see posting “day in my life” videos and post what street they live on, what gym they go to, what grocery store they shop at, what company they work for
Multiple people have come out and said they had to move because people found them IRL and stalked them
Don’t get me started on the very very young children I see engaging in parts of the internet that I didn’t even know existed when I was 10
lol….most adults don’t know. Worst yet, many do know but choose to ignore the lessons.
Absolutely not. Hell, I don’t think adults are either.
There’s a huge difference between being taught and actually following it.
I think if their parents are narcissists where they have to show their kids everywhere for any reason for some type of virtue signaling, then they aren’t taught. I have met so many people who turned out to be abusive parents who shared their kids so much on social media to create plausible deniability in our fucked child welfare system. Like for example, coworker shares everything and shares her kids and how much she loves them. We know all their names and they are cute. But behind closed doors she lets strangers in the house, does drugs with them, has sex with people in front of them, beats them, joins others in beating them, and sexually abuses them. Let’s just say I called child welfare services, the local police, and immigration because they would even pridefully say they scammed the system and are not getting consequences for their lengthy criminal records. People are trash and Reddit tends to have a more educated base. I’m talking people who would rather do crimes than even get a GED.
And among them on facebook and tiktok where it’s all projecting and shit-talking, you know it’s because of plausible deniability that people think they can just scam so that way when they get child services contacted they can turn around and show their narcissistic social media feed.
Absolutely not.
Absolutely not and it’s terrifying honestly
I don’t think even adults have the first clue about internet safety.
Fuck no lol.
Most adults aren’t even as safe as they should be, and that goes for everywhere, not just the US. The absolute biggest thing I am doing is not allowing my kids to have a smartphone until they are AT LEAST 16, and probably not until 18.
My oldest is 7, and I think that it is absolutely abhorrent that kids her age are given free range on electronics. Not in my house, lol.
I remember having a class or two that went over how to figure out reliable sources for things. But it might not have stuck for some people.
Nope and even if you do tell them they don’t listen, because it’s always can’t happen to me BS.
Absolutely not.
Lolno
As someone in IT, most people in general don’t really know how to safely use the internet.
Lots of people know little bits and pieces, but they aren’t completely being safe.
I think the US teaches kids poorly around look at the numbers we are 13th, thank God the department of education is going away.
Kids aren’t known to make smart decisions or exercise critical thinking. There’s also a bunch of them posting questionable photos of themselves on Reddit too. There’s a false sense of security among kids despite the urging to be cautious.
Nope. We pinballed from what amounted to abstinence (don’t talk to strangers, stay off social media, internet really scary and dangerous) to the opposite (let me call a random stranger to come pick me up and drive me home, putting our entire lives out there, etc.)
No kids anywhere are properly taught internet safety.
Kids are overprotected in the real world, and under protected online.
I drilled it into my kids and made a point to check their social media to make sure they weren’t posting identifying information and they’d still do it and I’d have to scrub it. Took a few times for them to get it though.
No. Even the people that think they know internet safety don’t know internet safety. I suspect this is a problem the world over, not just the states.
I’m excited to hear who should teach them this, then sad to find out the answer will inevitably be schools, like everything else that society has abdicated.
No. Next question…
If they aren’t giving their personal address ,they probably have very little to worry about
Whatever they teach you while you’re a kid will probably be outdated or inadequate by the time you graduate
My kid is but most kids definitely are not. The problem is mostly that a lot of parents don’t know or practice it and as such can’t teach it. Plus the education does mostly nothing to address it because we have a ridiculous patchwork system here.
Where I grew up A lot of schools have “safety week” every year. This is where they will spend a day going a different topic such as fire, tornados, internet, and so on. (they still do this yearly)
However, many students just don’t pay attention and even if they do it is pretty easy to forget.
I wish we incorperated this idea into news and radio stations. Pick a week once per year and have a presenter go over a topic for 30 minutes every day. Maybe even add a day for scams. I think that would be helpful for everyone.
We can try, but without constant monitoring, kids will inevitably wind up in some unsavory spots giving out too many details. The internet’s too vast and the kids are too ignorant. One of the few benefits of the modern internet being dominated by a handful of websites is it makes monitoring their activity easier because they’ll only be on 3-5 different websites. No bouncing back and forth between SomethingAwful, Neogaf, Newgrounds, Flashplayer, JoeCartoon, various AngelFire fan websites, a dozen random forums, AIM Messenger, and YTMND like I did.
A lot of adults don’t have good safety practices on the Internet.
Me, I know what I shouldn’t do but I still do it anyways.
No
Can’t judge what “most” are taught, but given the lack of knowledge by the adults who are their parents it has to be worrisome. Don’t know what’s taught in schools starting at the elementary level, but with parents being the supervisors and enforcers, and the peer pressures involved, you’d have to conclude far too many kids are very vulnerable.
Most aren’t even taught what to do on the internet at all.