Online Safety – Email and Instant Messaging
Using the Internet for emailing and instant messaging a is a great way to stay in touch, keep on top of work-related projects, socialize and more. These very convenient tools, however, are not without their share of potential pitfalls. Parents and children who use email and messaging should be aware of a few ground rules that can help keep them safer online.
Email and Instant Messaging
When it comes to email safety, these tips can help:
- Use different email addresses for different purposes – That means parents, for example, might want to have one email address for online banking, one for online shopping and one for talking with family and friends. This helps make ferreting out scam and phishing emails a whole lot easier. If, for example, a bank email appears in the “family” email box, there’s a darn good chance it’s malicious and should be deleted without opening. The use of different screennames can also be helpful for instant messaging. It becomes much harder for predators, for example, to follow kids from one chat room into another if the kids have different screen names for each chat room.
- Spam filters are a must – This goes for both parents and their children, but children should have the highest level of spam filtering turned on. A study conducted by Symantec found that 80 percent of kids report receiving spam on a daily basis.
- Email account names should be carefully selected – While parents might use their first and last names for business reasons, email account belonging to children should not have real names attached. This can lead strangers to them, which can prove especially dangerous.
- Access is vital – Parents should also know the email account passwords their kids use so they can access the accounts, check who is sending them mail and make sure correspondence is appropriate. Parents should stress, however, this isn’t being done out of a lack of trust, but simply to protect them.
- Frequent password changes can be useful – For any online accounts, strong passwords are a must. That means selecting those with letter and number combinations along with special symbols. Passwords should never be shared and they should be changed on a regular basis to thwart hackers.
- Understand the lingo – Kids use a lot of shortcuts in instant messaging, emails and text messaging. Parents should know the lingo involved with the abbreviations so they can better understand what it being set to and from their children.
Here are some of the more common messaging abbreviations and what they stand for:
- POS/P911/PAW/PAL - Parent alerts
- BFF - Best friends forever
- BRB - Be right back
- G2G, GTG - Got to go
- L8R – Later
- LOL - Laugh out loud
- NM JC - Nothing much, just chilling
- SMH – Smacking my head
- TTYL - Talk to you later
- TY/TX – Thanks
- YW - You’re welcome
To get a more complete look at abbreviations, visit http://en.wiktionary.org/Appendix:English_internet_slang.
Critical recommendations:
- Teach kids to never click on links in emails since they may lead to phishing website
- Disable preview functions in emails to stop malicious code from executing
- Kids should never respond to emails from people they don’t know
- Kids should never accept links or files through instant messages
- Children’s social networking and instant messaging profiles should never be set on public
- Instant messaging profiles should be established to keep strangers at arm’s length
- Use good antivirus software
- Kids should never use programs that signal when they are online
- Kids should log out of IM programs when they are not using them
Email and Instant Messaging programs are very convenient, but they can open the doors for danger. When parents and their children follow some ground rules, it’s possible to enjoy the benefits without the pitfalls.