- Children should never give their on-line password to anyone.
- Children should never reveal personal information such as their real name, parents name, age, address, telephone number, or where they go to school to anyone on-line. In the case of instant messaging ID’s or profiles, personal information should be avoided or prohibited by parents.
- Children should never continue on-line conversations they find disturbing, too personal, or just uncomfortable. One of the good features of instant messaging is that just like the telephone, kids can disconnect from the chat session if this occur. Parents should also encourage their kids to tell them about any situation where this happens.
By Adam Wilkenfeld CWK Producer
"There was one day I stayed on for like 8 hours," Christina, 11, who uses Instant Messenger.
Eleven-year-old Christina is one of thousands of kids who use instant messenger every day, but how does it work, and is it safe for kids? There’s a lot about the software that parents need to know.
"What it is is a way to almost in real time communicate with a friend or someone else on the Internet," says Nick Voigt, the director of the Center for E-Commerce at Georgia Tech University. "A chat room is many on many. Instant messaging was originally started out as a one-on-one kind of thing."
Christina says she uses Instant Messenger to talk with her friends about homework, school, and boys. She has 90 names on her buddy list.
What scares her mom is knowing that it is just as easy for her to talk to strangers, and for strangers to find and talk to her. "If somebody says I’m eleven, I’m ten, I’m twelve, does she respond to that message, or does she ignore it because she doesn’t know?" worries Christina’s mom, Yen Chun Peters. "To me they don’t care who’s that person, it is about age. So that’s what makes me think about the danger part."
Voigt agrees. He says kids should know the person they are instant messaging, in real life. "People I’m sure have many identities. You can be a male and sort of designate your age as 16 when you are really a male at 55," Voigt says. "Other people are able to see who is online, or who it is online, and actually join a conversation. But it is up to you whether you continue that conversation or whether you just ignore anything they say."
There is an option within the Instant Messaging privacy menu parents and kids can use to block strangers from contacting them. But for an extra measure of safety, parents should make sure their kids don’t put any personal information in their instant messaging profile. "If your child has a profile that says their real name, or where they’re located or things like that, you run into some kind of risk that that might be available to someone else," Voigt says.
Instant Messaging software is freely available from companies like AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo!
Instant Messaging Overview and Terminology
Chat – is an Internet term describing real-time, online communication between two users via computers. Once a chat session has been started, any participants in the chat can enter text via their computer keyboard that will appear on the monitor of other participants in the chat session.
Instant messaging (IM) – is generally thought of as a type of communications service that enables users to create private chat rooms and participate in on-line conversations with other PC users. Instant messaging is similar to email in that both use text as the primary means of communicating between users. However, with instant messaging the communication is more or less immediate, while email replies usually take longer to be exchanged. The instant messaging system alerts the participants of the on-line discussion when someone from their chat group is on-line.
There are many instant messaging systems offered by a variety of vendors. The most well known of these instant messaging service providers is America On-line (AOL). However, other vendors such as Yahoo and Microsoft, just to name a few, also offer instant messaging. There are no universal standards for these instant-messaging systems. So anyone that you want to communicate with in this fashion must use the same system that you do.
Many of the Internet service providers (ISP) offer some form of instant messaging. Typically, there is no additional charge for instant messaging service when it is provided by the several competing services.
Instant messaging service users typically set up lists of users that can communicate with them and participate in their chat sessions. Most systems allow users to issue warnings to people who they believe are sending inappropriate messages to them. Most IM service also allow chat group members to block communication entirely from users they want to exclude from communication for any reason.
If instant messaging participants want to find out more about other members of their chat session, most systems allow users to select individual users and to see their profiles. Parents should know, however, that there is no way currently to verify the information contained in these ID’s, or profiles. Users can provide as little or as much information as they desire, use any number of aliases, and can easily falsify information if they choose. Some chat groups use special code words that they tell other members to include in their profiles as a way they can identify each other. However, there is no way to really police this.
Suggestions for Parents
Currently, instant messaging services have no way to insure that inappropriate contact does not occur via their systems. Their ability to prevent this type of contact is limited to canceling the service agreements of anyone who uses the services in ways they deem appropriate. As with most situations, parents have the ultimate responsibility for monitoring their children’s Internet activities, including instant messaging. According to The Safe Child Book, parents should establish basic ground rules for their children’s interactive participation. Some of the ground rules recommended in the book include:
Resources
The Safe Child Handbook; Sherryll Kratzer, Ph. D. Author; Simon and Schuster Publishers; pp 116 – 118.
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