Social Networking Sites

By Tina L Douglas

Social networking sites are officially the hottest trend in the world of networking and establishing connections. It can significantly increase your circle of friends and it can also expose you to people who pretend to be friends but actually have malicious intents.

Kids are one of the most avid fan of social networking sites, thus it is important that we secure their surfing habits because a lot of scammers, spammers, identity theft criminals and hackers all abound online.

Here are some tips:

Explain to your child that there are certain pieces of personal information that should be private, and therefore should not be shared on whichever social networking site they join into. These personal data includes your child's full name, birthday, telephone number and address. No child is too young nor too old to understand this very simple concept.

Discuss with your kids that they should only post information that they feel comfortable sharing with other people. If, for instance, your child is not comfortable with seeing how she looked way back from kindergarten, do not have it scanned and posted. Doing otherwise can make your child hinder from joining social networking sites.

Adjust your child's privacy settings and clearly specify the "levels" of friendship before you start adding people to your "networks." Whenever possible, specify that "only friends" can gain access to your personal details.

Your kids should be informed that any information that they will post online does not have an "undo button." Your kids may be too young to handle responsibilities but there are kids who can be very witty and smart to understand this very simple idea.

Talk about sex with your kids. If you don't talk about it, then chances are they will seek for answers online. While there are a lot of websites that can explain the details fully to your kids, talking about it at home can be very confident and independent. They should always learn it from you.

Gut-feel is something that is in between true and false but that has actually happened. If, for instance, your child is browsing to a certain site and a pop up box appeared asking for your child's personal details, your child has to be very careful with what you share and which you don't. Ask them to ignore these pop ups.

Once your child starts to engage in social networking sites and their circle of friends starts to grow, there is no stopping them. There will be instances when you will not know who they are chatting with and whether the other person is the person who he or she claims that she is.

You have to be very observant of this strategy because a lot of identity theft crimes have been traced back to children chatting with another adult who pretends to be mere six or seven years old, and asking them of their personal account information. This is the information age and the presence of chat and social networking site has become a fad for children of all ages (okay, so maybe children below the age of 3). For this reason, every parent should be vigilant of the things that your kid's uses and be very diligent in protecting your kids from identity theft activities.

Tina L. Douglas is a well established author on the topic of identity theft.

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