Safety Tips

Safety tips for children | Safety tips for parents | Internet traps | Filtering tools | Useful links

Safety tips for children

Explain to your parents your experiences while surfing the Internet.
Always tell a parent or adult if you come across bad language, distasteful pictures or find material which is scary or threatening.
Always keep your personal details safe and never give out your name, address or school's name, telephone number, or a photo or yours, to someone you met over the Internet even if he asks for it.
Always keep your password strictly personal. It is like your home's keys: you do not give them to anyone.
Only agree to meet someone you have met in cyberspace once you have your parents/carer's permission, and then only when they can be present.
Take care when chatting to people in a chat room or through email. Never hang around if someone makes you feel uncomfortable or worried.
Do not believe everything that you see or learn through the Internet. Learn to be critical.

Safety tips for parents

Keep the computer in a family room not locked away in a bedroom. Take the time to learn how the Internet works and spend time surfing together with your children and learn from them.
Make sure you tell your children to be wary of strangers they meet online. Just in the same way as you are wary of a stranger knocking on your door make sure your children never reveal any personal details about themselves.
Be particularly careful about your children using Chat rooms unsupervised. Do not allow your children to ever meet anyone they have contacted via the Internet without you going with them.
Encourage your children to stick to the positive sites that you want them to see, and not to the ones that you do not.
Consider using filtering software, which restricts access to certain parts of the Internet.
Discuss Internet safety with your children. Discussing the potential dangers with your children needs care and sensitivity and involves helping them to see the dangers for themselves.
Know who to report to if you come across harmful or illegal material on the Internet.

Internet Traps

Children can come across inappropriate pornographic or offensive material.
Children can make contact with those who would seek to harm them.
Children are at risk to the pressures of subtle, but powerful advertising on the Internet.
Children can become immersed and addicted and may lose out on developing their social skills, finishing their homework or playing face to face with other children.

Filtering tools

A filtering tool is a software package that attempts to block Internet sites that contain illegal of harmful content.

The effectiveness of each package depends on the sophistication of the software as well as the degree to which the blockings lists are up-to-date. Different filtering tools could be more effective in blocking different type of harmful sites. For example, some filtering tools could be more effective in blocking sites containing sexually explicit and child pornographic material while others could be more effective in blocking sites containing violence or racism.

Some Internet providers have filtering tools integrated in their services and there is not need for further filtering tools.

Here is a list of known filtering tools (in alphabetic order):

Useful links

If you need more information on how to protect yourself and your children from the hidden dangers of Internet you could consult the related links we suggest in our respective page.