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Audio Article
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While Keeping Our Kids Privacy & Secure in 21st Century
As you prepare your children to return to school, whether in distance learning or a traditional class, have you set suitable measures to protect them from the lurking dangers at school? Most parents have taken health measures to protect their children from COVID-19, among other health issues, but very few have taken steps to protect their privacy.
The state comptroller has repeatedly warned that children’s privacy in schools is not covered as required and that there are failures in safeguarding their information. While the education system has promised to improve students’ information security, schools and teachers seem unaware of the potential dangers of insecurity and how to deal with them effectively.
It is high time parents took part in protecting their children’s privacy. You should teach your children how to protect themselves from an invasion of privacy, bullying, and phishing just before they return to school. Some of these steps may include: Replacing default passwords, not sharing personal information on social media, and maintaining a neutral background in zoom.
The School Year begins:
This is How you Should take care of your Children upon Returning to School.
ZOOM LESSONS:
Protecting Passwords
To avoid password theft, log in to your child’s account and falsify their identities. Ensure that they use strong passwords for the computer and distance learning applications. Remind them always to replace initial passwords with a strong password. Also, please encourage them to use different passwords for different applications to avoid the bridge of other systems in case of an attack. You should enable two-factor authentication if the plan allows it to prevent unauthorized entries with high certainty.
NOTE: A strong password comprises eight (8) characters that include letters in different languages, numbers, and symbols.
Ensure your children use a desktop or laptop whose operating system has malware protection software. Additionally, ensure that the computer has a firewall system to block intrusion attempts. Importantly, encrypt the home network (WiFi) under a new strong password, different from the initial password.
Video Lessons
Ensure that your child’s background view during camera roll is neutral. Some children have gone through embarrassment and humiliation because of some captured objects during live classes. If your children use a system that doesn’t require video recording, ensure you cover the camera (including the phone camera). Skilled hackers can take control of the camera remotely and photograph your children unknowingly.
Information Security
Ensure your children use a desktop or laptop whose operating system has malware protection software. Additionally, ensure that the computer has a firewall system to block intrusion attempts. Importantly, encrypt the home network (WiFi) under a new strong password, different from the initial password.
Personal Information
Applications and learning systems tend to take more of your child’s information than necessary. Children are ideal victims of such systems because they love to fill out questionnaires and talk about themselves. As such, deprive your children of details that you don’t want to get to the public domain. Also, discourage them from signing up on unfamiliar networks that pop up on Google, Facebook, or other familiar sites. Importantly, please encourage them to sign up with an email address rather than a phone number.
SOCIAL NETWORKS:
Privacy Settings:
It is possible to control personal information on social media networks such as Facebook and Tik Tok through activating privacy settings. Take time to study privacy settings and tools in your children’s accounts before teaching them how to use them. Also, please encourage them to limit their posts, pictures, and responses on social media, avoid replying and accepting friend requests from suspicious people.
Utilize Separate Email:
The Privacy Protection Authority recommends opening separate email accounts for different uses. For example, you can encourage your children to have an email for downloading applications and another one for sending private messages. This move will help to minimize the chances of hacking.
About Sharing Details:
Teach your children about the dangers of sharing information online that allows people to reach them the physically-residential address, school, and class. Neither should they share their phone number or an email address on social networks. They should also avoid sharing contact information across networks; it will be easy for hackers to trace and attack them.
Caution Kids about Labeling and Tags!
Tagging and labeling excite kids since it attracts more followers. Unfortunately, it also makes it easy for unwanted people to gather their information. Children’s followers should only come from a personal acquaintance rather than labeling. Sometimes tagged posts include information your child would not prefer shared. In such a case, they should demand its immediate removal.
SMARTPHONES:
Prevent Phishing!
This is a coup d’etat that calls for a high level of suspicion in any message that arrives via SMS, WhatsApp or any social network. The danger is more significant due to kids’ innocence. Encourage your kid not to click on unknown links, or at least to clarify with the person who sent the link for information
Thermal Attempts
Clicking on a phishing link may lead your child to a website that looks legitimate, yet it is not. Discourage them from providing passwords n such sites since fraudsters mostly use such sites. Let them know that service providers don’t ask for passwords through a text message or email.
Software Updates
It is recommended to update your child’s apps whenever the update is offered. Most updates fix security vulnerabilities in the system, making it hard for hackers to exploit them.
Phone password
Secure your kids’ phone with a strong password. Also, ensure that it is saved in a secure place. Advanced smartphones can add additional protections.
PASSWORD MANAGER:
A word from SARAH KATRINA:
As much as it is not comfortable, Yep! any website takes few more steps to log in, in our family, we use the family account for password manager (Dashlane), and at Kids on the Yard, we use Zoho Vault on top of many other layers of security local and networked. Having one of the password managers may be the single best way to boost your online security. You won’t need to remember dozens of long, complicated passwords anymore; instead, one long, complex password will unlock all the rest.
The best password managers quickly and easily generate strong passwords for you, and most of them have browser plug-ins that will automatically fill in login forms. Many also fill in credit card numbers and personal details and support different devices, including mobile phones and tablets.
A list of familiar password managers:
You can decide to save passwords locally (in computers and mobile devices), in the cloud, or on someone else’s servers. Each approach has its pros and cons.
NOTE: The best password managers don’t allow the recovery of master passwords if forgotten. Some may allow you to recover the account through other means.
FINAL WORD:
This guide on maintaining students’ privacy was written based on the recommendations of the Privacy Protection Authority in the Ministry of Justice and other sources. It was also reported based on the dismal experience of many children who have suffered shame and cyberbullying due to the leakage of their private information.
