Sue Scheff: ReputationDefender Helping to Stop Cyberbullying

Source: ReputationDefender

How to Stop Cyber Bullying

Cyber Bullying is an act of aggression exercised online and is typically experienced by web-savvy teens and pre-teens. Cyber bullying, which can take place through social networking sites, forums, emails, instant messaging conversations, and blogs, are aimed at causing emotional harm on the part of the victim. This harm often takes the form of embarrassment, an attack on the victim’s self esteem, or promoting a sense of isolation in the victim through exclusion from social circles.

Cyber bullying, simply put, is easier to accomplish than offline bullying. While an aggressor bullying at school is easily identified, so-called “e-bullies” can hide behind the monitors of their personal computers, protecting the aggressor from the consequences of their tactics.

Human behavior among young people hasn’t changed, but technology and the scope of ramifications has increased dramatically. As the PEW Internet & American Life Project observes, “the impulses behind [cyber bullying] are the same [as those for offline bullying], but the effect is magnified.”

There is no easy way to stop cyber bullying, but there are ways to diminish its effects on your children. Below are a few tips parents and adults can use to help young people understand the potential challenges they face online.

Monitor Your Child’s Mood

Pay attention to your child’s overall mood. Do they seem quiet after spending time online? Does their behavior, aggression, or frustration levels change after they spend time on the Internet?
Teens and children are unlikely to outwardly admit if they are being bullied, largely due to feelings of inferiority, low-self esteem, or embarrassment at social exclusion. Pay attention to changes in your child’s behavior and ask them if they or anyone they know has had mean or hurtful things written about them online.

Talk to Your Kids About Privacy

Engage your child in an honest discussion on the contradiction of terms in the phrase: “privacy on the Internet.” According to the PEW Internet & American Life Project, 15% of teens said that someone they know had forwarded or otherwise posted online communications that they, the teens “assumed was private.” Young people often “copy-paste” instant message conversations or email messages meant to be private, and share them publicly for purposes of embarrassment, social exclusion, or simply malice. There is an easy solution to this type of cyber bullying, widely considered to be the most common form of online harassment: make sure your kids know that nothing published, typed, posted, or shared online is private. Encourage your kids to refrain from communicating ideas online that they would not want their friends, family, or peers to see.

Familiarize Yourself with Your Child’s Online Habits

Make sure you know what it is exactly that your child does when he or she is online. Is your child active on social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace? Studies have shown that young people who use social networking sites are more prone to have experience with cyber bullying, either as an aggressor, as a victim, or even both.

As logic would suggest, the more time your child spends online, particularly if they regularly share their thoughts and ideas on the World Wide Web, the more susceptible he or she is to cyber bullying.

Talk to Your Child About Community Responsibility

According to the PEW Internet & American Life Project’s data on online teens, young people who regularly create content online through blogs, web sites, or photo upload sites are more likely than those teens who do not contribute to the online community to report cyberbullying and online harassment. This data demonstrates that teens that are active in creating a positive community in which they can express themselves are also eager to police it, and thus protecting their community from damaging harassment and hurtful aggression.

Talk to your kids about the fact that their online community can be a healthy place to express themselves, if certain rules are adhered to. The more active your kids are on reporting cyber bullying and online harassment, the easier it will be to reduce its strength.

For more information on keeping your kids safe online, along with a guide to approaching online crime and privacy issues, visit http://www.reputationdefender.com/.

Sue Scheff: Parenting Teens Online

This is a very interesting article that will make parents think when safety trumps privacy - do you suspect your teen or tween is posting disturbing photos or communicating with questionable others? As a parent is is our responsibility to help keep our kids safe online. Having open lines of communication can help tremendously and helping them to understand the consequences of unflattering posts is critical.

We will spy on your teen’s website for you

More and more worried parents are resorting to using data-tracking services to keep up with what their teenagers are doing on the internet, writes Siobhan Cronin

Source: Independent.ie

Irish parents are the best in Europe at monitoring their kids on the internet. However, their kids are the least likely of all European children to turn to mum or dad for advice when something happens to them online.

These were the results of a recent survey by the European Commission into internet supervision by parents.

While our parents might be good at keeping tabs on their kids, cyber bullying is still on the increase, sometimes with tragic results.

Cork girl Leanne Wolfe’s horrific tales of bullying were revealed in her diary, days after her death by suicide last year.

Her sister later told of the nasty text messages and vicious internet entries which led Leanne to take her own life.

It is real-life stories like Leanne’s which have led thousands of American parents — and now a few hundred Irish ones — to resort to using a service that will keep tabs on what their children are reading, and uploading, on the web.

But it’s not just bullying that worries parents. Unfettered access to the web for our kids has also meant open access to them from anyone who is ‘roaming’ around in cyberspace.
This has led some parents to take the ultimate action — spying on their own children.

The founder of Reputation Defender, Michael Fertik, has been called to justify his online service: “Would you like to know your 16-year-old daughter is putting pictures of herself wearing only a bra on the web? Yes. People are not born with good judgment and it rarely develops by 15,” he says.

But another defence of Fertik’s service is, he claims, the prevalence of web bullying.
“When we were at school, we wrote mean notes to each other but you threw the piece of paper out the next day — now it’s on the internet wall forever,” he says.

Fertik’s solution, MyChild, scours the internet for all references to your child — by name, photography, screen name, or social network profiles.

For about €9.95 per month, the ‘online spy’ will send you a report of what your child has posted on the worldwide web.

Its approach is unashamedly tapping into parents’ paranoia: “Worried about bullies? Concerned that your teens’ friends and peers are posting inappropriate materials online,” the site asks.
Fertik, who says he has a “few hundred” Irish customers already, says his company grew out of a need to protect online privacy.

“Young people do the same things that they always did,” he points out. But now it’s on a wall on a web page. The internet is like a tattoo parlour.”

The firm, which started in his apartment in Kentucky, and now employs 65 staff servicing 35 countries, brought in revenues of $5.5m (€4.3m) this year.

He insists there is no “hacking” involved. His staff go through legitimate channels, but are simply better trained in the ways of teenage internet usage than most parents.

“We always encourage the parent to get the password — we don’t want to be spying on kids,” he adds.

One of the things that often causes concern among parents is the practice of their own lives being discussed on a website. “These things have always been discussed by children, but now it’s up there for everyone to see. Things like: ‘My parents are fighting’ or ‘I think they are going to get a divorce’.”

In pre-web days, we all had very intimate conversations with our peers about our home lives — either in person, or on the phone. Now it’s all on the internet, Fertik notes.

Once the offending material is identified, Reputation Defender can delete it, on the instructions of the parent, whether it involves comments, photographs or videos posted on social-networking sites, or on chat rooms or forums.

The service has become so popular that the company now offers packages to adults to manage search engine results, ‘reputation’ for career purposes, and general ‘privacy’ — so that you can stop sites selling your personal information to others.

But that very privacy is the reason that children’s rights organisations around the world have come out strongly against the practice.

Michael McLoughlin of Youthwork Ireland, which provides support and youth services for over 40,000 young people, says that while there may be some justification of the service for younger teens, this could become somewhat blurred when dealing with children of 16 or 17 years of age.
“At that stage in their lives they should really know what they are doing themselves,” he says. Youthwork Ireland is currently preparing guidelines for youth workers dealing with online bullying. “We try to tool them up on social networking, and try to improve the safety aspects.”
The ISPCC agrees that children need to be made aware of the risks of online networking. However, National Childline Manager Margie Roe says that while parents need to respect privacy and maintain trust, they also need to police their children if they think they might be in any danger.

“If a parent is concerned about their child, they have a right to protect them,” she says.
“They need to be careful they don’t damage the trust between them and their child, but if they feel their behaviour is in anyway unusual, or their child is disappearing a lot, then it could be justified.”

This would be particularly relevant if parents are concerned their children might be making plans to hook up with people they have only met online, says Margie.

Michael Fertik is adamant that he is not doing anything ethically wrong.

“If a kid is 18 or older, we won’t do it. Parents who are signing up for this feel they don’t know how to keep up with their kids and they don’t understand Facebook or Bebo.”

He says the children themselves have mastered the art of ‘multiple’ personalities, in order to make discovery of their sites more difficult, but Reputation Defender is on their case.

However, even Fertik’s own ’solution’ can be subject to unsavoury interference. The system flags a query when the last name of the parent does not match the child’s, prompting further requests from the applicant, before they are given information on the child’s use of the web.
Fertik’s attitude appears to be that online surveillance is now a necessary evil in our modern world.

“There is no medical privacy for kids, no legal privacy. We are not suggesting they shouldn’t be allowed use the internet, but it’s like driving a car — you want to make sure they know how to drive first.

“We are not spying on someone else’s kid. It’s a new day, the internet brings new threats, and we need new armour.”
- Siobhan Cronin

Sue Scheff: Do you know what your kids are typing online about you?

I read this very interesting Blog today on today's kids and what they can put online about not only themselves, but about their parents! Not excluding other family members.

By Eve Tahmincioglu

Are your Internet-crazed kids sabotaging your job search/career?

Who knows things about you that you’d rather not share with the general public? That you drink two or three martinis every night. Maybe you like to call in sick when you’re really not sick to play basketball with the kids. Or maybe you’re prone to punching in walls when you fight with your spouse.

I’ve written a lot about digital dirt lately. You know, the negative information about you on the Internet you don’t want your boss or prospective employers to see.

Well, here’s a minefield you better keep an eye on — Your own digitally savvy kids that seem to spend every waking moment of their lives sending weird things to eachother on Facebook, or MySpace.

The owner of ReputationDefender.com, Michael Fertick, recently told me of a new phenomenon he’s discovered in his quest to help people everywhere protect their online reputations. The company helps individuals by searching the Internet for bad stuff about their customers and then finding ways to get rid of it. Sometimes it’s as simple as calling a blogger and asking that something negative be removed, and in other cases it requires writing lots of good stuff about a client so it drowns out the bad stuff.

The bad stuff usually comes from disgruntled girlfriends or boyfriends; people criticizing something you wrote or a project you worked on; or maybe you got rowdy at a football game and the local paper wrote about you.

But Fertik was surprised when he discovered a new source for the bad stuff — his customers’ own kids.

Turns out some tweens, teens and even 20 somethings out there are writing about private family matters on social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, and also sharing their pain on blogs. And they’re naming names.“We’ve seen discussions by kids of parents’ incomes,” he says. For example, ‘Dad makes $75,000 per year’. They also write about their parents’ relationships, “‘Mom and Dad are fighting pretty hard tonight’, of career news ‘Mom didn’t get the promotion she wanted’; and even social habits or qualities, ‘Dad is such a d–k,’ or ‘Dad is a friggin’ alcoholic.’”

Parents shouldn’t be too surprised that their children are sharing this stuff on the Web. Kids have always had to vent about family issues to their friends, but before the Internet, conversations were kept out of the public forum, for the most part.

Fertik’s advice: Talk to your kids and check out their FaceBook accounts now. “Let them know whatever they write is a tattoo that can stain them and you (the parent), possibly forever,” he adds.

We’ve all been so worried lately that our kids may end up writing something about themselves, or sharing suggestive photos of themselves on social networking sites that could end up hurting them when they go out into the job market. None of us thought about what they may be writing about us.

Is there something your kids know that could come back to haunt you?