Hi,
I’m new here and just wanted to express something I am feeling passionate about. I feel like schools should be teaching the importance of cyber security, privacy and online safety in their IT lessons, rather than how to make a PowerPoint presentation, for example. I’m wondering if this is a valid opinion I have, as I’m considering contacting the education department of the government about these ideas.
More children and teenagers are using the Internet, a lot of them unsupervised (I think there should be an age limit except in school for work, but that’s a topic for another day), and I don’t think most are prepared for the risks of using it. Many adults too – parents should also be educated if their children are online. For example, there’s a TikTok family who regularly post their children getting ready for school and share personal things with their audience on LIVE. There’s people in the comments warning them about the dangers of this, but the family seem to think they’re ‘trolling’. There’s also many people in the comments sticking up for the family saying the people warning them are ‘paranoid’ and that it is ‘unlikely predators are watching as they’d rather watch kids irl’. It’s a bizarre way of thinking to me (someone who has a degree in CS/tech), but I blame the lack of education in both schools and elsewhere, about the importance of privacy. There’s software I’ve used during my studies that can extract location metadata from media shared online, and there’s a lot of people who have public profiles on social media with photos of their children on them. The Tiktok family mentioned also have accounts (mainly old men) commenting on how ‘gorgeous’ they are, but that seems to be disregarded by the family in question!
I also see schools in my area creating public Facebook pages and posting photos of the children everyday and what they are going to be doing (even if it’s a walk into a public area!). I’ve tried speaking to the staff about this as they have weird accounts following their page, but they don’t understand the severity of it.
What are your opinions on this?
Thank you for reading.
Comments
A child’s mind is highly impressionable and we’re all largely the product of our environment during our developmental years — if anything I cannot believe we allow literal children free reign access on the internet. I was exposed to depraved horrors online when I was a child myself, I’m 25 now and from what I’ve seen now, I had it easy. All my childhood friends are a little funny in the head, and I think now we all wish we had a more moderated online experience as children.
It would be easier if we could all agree what is an appropriate age to let kids on social media. There wouldn’t be any need to teach 6 year olds about how to protect themselves on social media if we know they won’t be on it until there 14
I think the kids on social media thing is a ticking time bomb. I think it will relatively common in future for adult children to sue their parents for exploiting them on social media.
Plenty of influencer types have to deal with stalking and related threats/attacks.
My son is in primary school and does online safety lessons so I would assume it is already part of the curriculum
You are right but also other age groups need to be aware of online safety too, it isn’t just children that are at risk. Just one look at the scams page on here will show multiple elderly people falling for fake celebrity romances and crypto investments