Do you know where your children are?
There’s a chance that everyone else does, thanks to the ever-growing number of mobile phone applications that can pinpoint a cellphone user’s location.
One of them is the new Facebook Places feature. Some safety experts are expressing specific concerns about it, while noting it is just the latest cybersafety issue of which parents should be aware.
Linda Criddle, president of the Safe Internet Alliance, a Virginia nonprofit group, says Facebook quietly rolled its new application out last month, possibly under the radar of parents who are not tech-savvy.
“One of the major objections we have is that they didn’t inform people properly,” she says on the phone from Seattle. “Most people don’t understand the repercussions. Suddenly there is a whole new risk, and parents don’t even know enough to talk to their kids about it.”
Facebook representative Nicky Jackson Colaco disagrees that Facebook has failed to inform parents or put appropriate safeguards in place.
“When we launched Places, we created a great deal of educational information for everyone who uses Facebook including parents,” Colaco said in an e-mailed response. “We published a blog post and placed features about safety throughout the site, including on our Safety Page at www.facebook.com/fbsafety. We also created a special video that explicitly covers protections for minors and posted it across the site. We have held multiple sessions of Facebook Live dedicated to educating people about Places, and have had its launch streaming on continuous loop on this page.”
The technology is not new it has already been used on FourSquare, Gowalla and Twitter.
Criddle says that, unlike these other sites, Facebook has many users who are minors and are not familiar with how the application can be used or abused. Kids may inadvertently broadcast their location to people who want to harm them. While it only shares the information with those that a minor designates as “friend,” she points out that many kids are quick to accept friend requests, which means they may have hundreds of “friends” they actually don’t know.
The importance of a child being selective about friends is a point on which both Criddle and Colaco agree.
“Everyone, including minors, should always be careful to choose their friends carefully this is true everywhere on Facebook, not just on Places, and in the offline world as well,” Colaco writes.
How to cope
Criddle says parents should have a discussion with their children about whether they want to enable any or all of the features of Places.
“Sit down and talk about what it means if people can find where you are,” she says. “It’s easy to see all the cool things, like my friends will know where I am, but the flip side is does your child really want an ex-boyfriend or ex-girlfriend to track everywhere they are?”
Caroline Knorr, parenting editor for Common Sense Media, a San Francisco-based nonprofit company that advocates for kids and families in managing media, says that with technology changing so quickly, it’s important to put into context the larger concerns about children’s Internet safety and privacy.
Online harassment that’s been blamed for youth suicides and the issue of “sexting,” which has led to criminal charges against teens, have not gone away, she says. Also a continuing worry: inappropriate postings that can hurt kids when they apply to colleges or submit job applications.
“Don’t assume that you’re going to have one conversation with your kids and it’s done,” Knorr says. “It’s difficult for kids to understand that uploading something from the Internet can expose you to vast anonymous audiences and that anything you write can be forwarded to anyone in an instant.”
As a general rule, Criddle believes in saying yes when a child asks to explore new technology. The author of “Look Both Ways: Help Protect Your Family on the Internet,” wrote a chapter for the anthology “Courageous Parents, Confident Kids: Letting Go So You Both Can Grow,” on this very topic. She also writes ilookbothways.com, with the mission of making the Internet safer for consumers.
She says that if parents are inflexible or fail to help them understand the risks, kids may create their own separate, secret lives. Many of them do that already, to a certain extent, using acronyms such as P911, as in parent alert, and KPC for Keeping Parents Clueless.
“I tell parents that your knee-jerk reaction that ‘You can’t have that’ has to change because that sets up the most dangerous situation, where the child sets it up anyway behind your back.”
Secret identities
Criddle says she has known kids to create a Facebook account for their parents to “friend” and follow, while creating and using a separate one with their friends. If children get into trouble on the secret site they are afraid to turn to their parents for help because they weren’t supposed to have this site in the first place.
“Your reaction to, ‘Mom, I want to do that’ has to be, ‘Yes, then how would we do that in a way that would be safe?’ ” Criddle says. ” ‘How are you going to demonstrate to me that you have the accountability to keep our family private?”‘
Knorr agrees.
“These new technologies are not inherently evil, but we need to teach our kids to use them responsibly and safely.”
About Facebook Places
The Facebook application works on smart phones, although it is possible to check in from nonsmart-phone devices.
Places is designed to tell your social network where you are. You “check in” using your mobile phone. Friends who see you at a location can also check you in.
It can be modified and disabled as follows:
-To change “Places I check in,” go to the account’s privacy settings.
-To change whether others can check you in without your knowledge or permission, click “Customize settings” on your privacy page and scroll down to the “Things others share” section. Disable the device’s ability for others to check you in. You also can block your location to people nearby if you opt out of “Include me in ‘People Here Now’ after I check in.”
-To turn off the ability for friends to check you in at Places, go to your Privacy Settings and turn off the setting to “Let Friends Check Me In.”Computer safety controls
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Many programs on the market are designed to help parents monitor their children.
Safe Eyes, a PC Magazine and Laptop magazine editor’s choice, available at internetsafety.com, will capture any activity on the Internet, no matter how many profiles a child has.
AOL recently launched Safe Social at www.safesocial.com, a program that allows parents to monitor their kids’ social-network conversations and send alerts about “friends” who are not age-appropriate, who don’t have friends in the same network or who pop up on a national registry of child predators.
Experts Linda Criddle and Caroline Knorr say parents should explore the free parental controls available on their browsers and keep in mind, too, that parental controls may need to change depending on the child’s age, expertise and attitude.
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