CyberSafety Tips for Parents

Stefanie Thomas from the Seattle Police Department talked to most of our students on May 19 during the 11th grade Smarter Balanced Test. By all accounts, the information was relevant and helpful.

Here are some notes for parents.

What to do if your child is victimized online:

• Provide documentation of all the harmful content posted.

• Print screens of social networking/emails

• Save text messages/take pictures of texts

• Report to school if bully attends same school

• Keep documentation of all contact with school and attempts if any to contact parents

• Report to police dept if: involves continuous harassment, threats to hurt/kill, sexually motivated harassment

Facebook: By posting User Content to any part of the Facebook, you automatically grant to the Company an irrevocable worldwide license to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute your Content for any purpose. You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time, but Facebook has the right retain archived copies of your User Content.

What to Monitor:

• Age appropriate content

• Posting where you live based content (such as Seahawks, name of school, etc)

• Sexually provocative images

• Negative content about students/friends/family members

• Personal information (age, birthday, school, sports teams, clubs, church, email, phone number)

• “Friending” large number of people – esp. people they do not know in real life

• Webcamming-

• Increase in sexually provocative videos by teens

• Ability to be recorded and reposted w/out knowledge and/or permission

• Increase cases of skype hacking – where people can do screen captures/videos through webcams.

• Sites like chatroulette – created an increase in stranger/stranger sexual webcamming

• Disable webcam if not using

• If keeping webcams active – monitor while teens use

• Sites like chatroulette, omegle, skype

Sexting

• Falls under the distribution of child pornography statute and the possession of child pornography statute.

• Do not forward any images found on your child’s phone

• Child has two options – delete immediately, report to authority figure

Rules & Communication: Every household needs to have rules regarding technology usage:

• Amount of time

• What devices are allowed

• What to do if you encounter problems/issues/inappropriate content

• Who gets administrator rights? Sharing passwords?

Great resource for reporting concerns: www.cybertipline.org