Should we be afraid of the Net?

This question does not have one good answer. The problem with the bad influence of the Internet that it has on the people, especially the youngest, is very complex. There is a proverb that claims “People are afraid of the things that they don’t know”. In the example of the internet it looks like it’s completely the opposite. The network is considered as a great tool that brings mainly the benefits to the whole society. Not many people are able to see any threats coming from this “blessing”.

What’s wrong?

The Internet network is full of threats that are lurking everyday on our private data. Just one unsafe click is sometimes enough to install software that is able to scan our hard drive, write down our logins and passwords and send it to the particular people. Viruses can damage our computer devices so they woldn’t work anymore. Next type of undesired content by many people are pornographic movies and pictures that oftenly appear on websites as ads. It is especially dangerous as far as young people mental health is concerned. More or less adults are aware of the fact that the violent videos show things that are not accepted, however the youngest people whose worldview is in the phase of developing may find it normal and in the future their mentality may be distorted. That may have very dramatic consequences in the future for them as well as for others in their environment. Another very dangerous aspect of inappropriate usage of the web network is sexual harassment. Offenders very often use some kind of chats, forums or social media in order to find contact with potential victims. Usually they do it by pretending to be teenagers that are looking for some friends. That helps them to get in touch with other teenagers seeking the same. Then their naivety is used to get some personal data like phone number, photos or address. From that point it is very close to a tragedy. As we can see there are plenty of reasons based on which we can assume that the internet is not so nice place at all.

What to do?

What we as an adults can do in order to keep the youngest safe? To give any advices to our kids, first of all we should educate ourselves. The knowledge and the experience are the basics and the start point of taking care of others. We should set up a few social media accounts, see how it works, what actions are we able to perform and indentify things that could be dangerous for the users. After we get some knowledge it is the right time to teach our kids how to safely use the Net. Learning by showing them on real examples seems like the best method. Kids are watching and doing it, so this way they will remember those things. We should build the awareness in their mind about what is good and what may be dangerous. They have to understand why we doing this, some real life examples that show the consequences of chatting with strangers may be shown to build the awareness of danger that comes from the online world. Last thing that the parents can do is to prevent of showing up the undesired content on children’s PC. The parental control software can be used to implement some features that will block the bad content coming from the web as well as filleting the mail box is just reporting what websites kid has visited.

About the author: 

If you would like to get some professional knowledge regarding the methods of parental control, feel welcome to visit http://www.pcwebcontrol.com/ and ask for any questions.

PCWebControl is third-party software dedicated to Windows operating system that is able to perform a big number of operations related with controlling the users activity on the computer.