Safe Social Networking - Tips on Safe Social Networking

Following are the tips for safe social networking which you as individual can take and of course teach your children in order to have a safer social networking experience.

Personal information stays private. Children must know that no personal information to be posted online. For safe social networking, children has to be remain anonymous as possible, meaning that no personal information such as first and last name, school name, sport team, city they are located at etc... to be given online.

Use privacy settings for restriction. Almost all the social networking sites provides access restrictions feature. Children must be encouraged to use this feature to allow who can access and post on your child’s website. Parents should teach their children on how to use these settings to limit who can view their online profile, and explain to them why this is important.

Extra care to be taken during and before posting videos and Photos. Children must be reminded that whatever they post cannot be taken back. Even if they are using access restriction features, there are ways that this feature can be broken, and there have been cases where the restriction feature was subverted. Children must know the consequences of posting their video or image. Preteens should should consult their parents before posting their pictures or videos. Online Predators are quick to synthesize information from those videos or pictures. Parents and children must consider if the video or picture that they are about to post does not reveal their identity or give any clue as from where the picture or video is shot. Look at the backgrounds, does it has their children's school name or the name of a mall? Is the t-shirt their children wearing has the name of their favorite sports team, or any kind of information that online predators can use to identify them.

No sex talk online. Recent research reveals that teens who don’t talk about sex with strangers online are less likely to come in contact with online predator, therefore children must be taught not to talk sex online.

Read sites’ privacy policies. Parents must take time to read social networking site’s privacy policy, FAQs, and parent sections to understand its features and privacy controls. The social networking site should spell out their rights as a parent to review and delete their child’s profile if their children is younger than 13. Most of the social networking sites provides links where parents or any users can immediately report abusive, suspicious, or inappropriate online behavior.

Take all the measures to be taken for blogging, instant messaging, and chatting. Since social networking sites provides all the services of blogging, instant messaging, chatting, read on to my previous articles on chat safety rules , Blogging Safety and IM safety. Though you may found some points similar to the ones I've touched on this "Social Networking Safety Tips " article, but you will find other invaluable tips on the above mentioned articles.

Visit where your kids visit online. Its important for parents to let their children know that they as parents are there to help them to socialize safely. Parent should sign up, and use the social networking spaces that their children visits. Let them know that you’re there. Parents should also review their child’s friends list. Parents can limit their child’s online “friends” to people their children actually knows in real life.

Its also recommended that parents must use a parental control software. Parental Control Software helps parents to censor foul language, inappropriate images etc... by using some sort of filtering mechanism. Parental Control Software also provides monitoring capabilities. It is really important to have a software that monitors children's activity. Monitoring helps parents to stop sexual predators making any advancement towards children on social networking sites such as myspace or facebook by providing or alerting parents either in real time or by some sort of email or logging mechanism.

At the end of "Safe Social Networking" article, I advise parents to know how their kids are getting online. With internet on cell phones, lot of children are accessing social networking sites through their cell phones. Parents must find out about limitations that they can place on to their children’s cell phone. For example, some cellular companies have plans that limit downloads, internet access, and text messaging; while there are other plans that allow kids to use those features only at certain times of day.

I hope "Safe Social Networking Tips" has enlighten you on how you can provide safe internet experience in general and safe socializing experience to your family.

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