Top tips on Internet safety for the summer

[sharmila banu.m]

Top tips on Internet safety for the summer

KUSA - Children are told not to talk to strangers. But parents should know the biggest threat of predators could be lurking inside the home, on the family computer.
The threat could be higher now that children are out of school and have more time to surf the Web. In fact, a recent survey found that 90 percent of teens and tweens plan to spend much of their vacation online.

That's why Comcast and McAfee teamed up to create downloadable guides to help parents talk to their children about Internet safety. One guide offers talking points for teens, and the other one is geared toward young children.

9NEWS talked with McAfee's Chief Cyber Security Mom, Tracy Mooney, and Senior Director of Security and Privacy at Comcast, Jay Opperman, about the guides.

Mooney is a mother of an 18, 12 and 5-year-old. She says she teaches her youngest child about the importance of passwords and not sharing them with friends. She adds that it's important to make sure even young children understand that when they interact with people online, those people are strangers just like the strangers on the street.

Mooney advises parents of teens to Google their children, to see if they are on a social networking site like Facebook or MySpace. Mooney explained a situation where she did that with her oldest son and found his MySpace page revealed personal information because the security settings were not set to "private." She then made sure he changed his privacy settings. Mooney says parents should open their own accounts on social networking sites to see what their children have on their pages.

"They don't always think before they post," Mooney said. "So, I make sure my kids know that what goes online stays online. Just because they delete something, doesn't mean that someone hasn't already downloaded it somewhere else or printed it off. It can come back and haunt them later on."

She says an innocent post could pose a risk.

"Kids today tend to use it (social networking sites) as an evite thing. And they don't always realize that everyone can use that invitation, and they might not want strangers to be able to know where they are going to be on Friday afternoon and be able to see the picture of them," Mooney explained.

Keeping computers in common areas of the home also helps parents monitor their children's online activities.

Opperman says the family room and kitchen are ideal places to have computers. He also reminds parents that Comcast offers free parental controls and McAfee security programs for customers with high speed data service. Those security programs have automatic updates. They can be downloaded from comcast.net/security along with the Cyber Summer Safety Challenge for parents.


SOURCE - GOOGLE
DATE - 30.06.09

[dhoni]

now a days we have to safety with internet
more antivirus have keep safety with updates but most of them are fake in their website to easily affect our system with virus this should clearly verify and download the antivirus with secure and have up to date keep