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Children are very quick to learn and to start using any Internet-enabled device, but lack of basic knowledge about online privacy and security can very easily lead to identity theft, downloads of malicious viruses and so on.

For example, Symantec, an online security company conducted a study in Singapore, which suggested that more than 1 million people in the country were victims to online crime last year ­ and 20 percent of them said that it was their children who had downloaded a virus or malicious software to the parents’ computer.

Another danger are cyberthieves, who see easy targets in children. Criminals, for example, can combine a child’s Social Security Number with a fake date of birth and address to open bank accounts, get credit cards or loans.

As children grow, they learn the safe procedures of using the Internet and sharing information on social media. However, the time before this learning curve is the most dangerous ­- and this is when parents and educators should step in and offer guidance.

Please take a look at some tips & tricks parents can implement at home to teach children about Internet privacy and safety.

1. Lay out some ground rules. Whether your child is a teenager or a kid in elementary school, you need to tell them a few basic guidelines. For example, you can start by telling that anything shared once on the Internet stays there forever and that nothing is 100% private.

2. Tell them to check with you. First tell your child what ‘personal information’ means. Draw up a list for them and tell them clearly that they should always consult with you before sharing those details together with any website or person on the Internet.

3. Password protection and usage. Children at a young age start creating their own email accounts these days. Although such email websites alert users to choose strong passwords, advise your child on what kind of passwords to choose. Tell them that the password could be a mix of characters and special symbols and ask them never to share their passwords with anyone, perhaps even with you. Diceware is an easy to use password methodology, where you roll a six-sided die five times and use the results to pick five random words from the list.

4. Curb social media usage. Children spend a lot of time on social media, so it’s important to let them know what is OK to share and what isn’t. Have a talk with your child and discuss what they should not share on social media, for everything stays forever on the Internet. If you want to take an extra step in securing your child’s online privacy, create fake social media names for them and fake school/city name.

5. IM and texting. Sending messages on IM clients like messenger or Whatsapp is something every teenager does, but they don’t always know that their chats are not 100% private. Therefore, you should advise them never to share personal or bank details or other sensitive information like passwords via messages.

6. Share news of personal hacks with them. If your child is big enough to understand this, share the latest news about identity thefts or personal hacks with them to make them aware of the dangers they face while using the Internet.

7. Explain the dangers of free public Wi-Fi. Kids love free Wi-Fi – who doesn’t? Cafes, shops, and even school cafeteria might have unsecured Wi-Fi networks. Explain to your kids to be especially cautious when connecting to these networks ­as they can easily be monitored. One of the best ways to safely use public Wi-Fi is by installing a VPN. You can pre-install a VPN on a mobile device and teach kids to turn it on whenever using public Wi-Fi.

8. Install a VPN. For ultimate protection install a VPN service on the device they use to encrypt their online communication data. VPN, or Virtual Private Network, creates a connection tunnel that automatically encrypts all the data coming in and out of your device, and effectively protects anyone using the Internet. NordVPN is one of the safest and most user-friendly VPNs on the market. All you have to do is press the ON button ­and you are connected. NordVPN works on up to 6 devices, and now also has Mac and Android apps.

9. Warn them of game scams. Agree to install games together with your kids. Research to see if the game and the provider are reputable. Make sure you download the games only from a reputable source after reading some reviews. Too often fake games are uploaded online, which are made to pop with color on websites, prompting kids to install them for free, when in fact it’s malware that could infect your device.

10. Communication with strangers. The Internet is as social as ever. New chat rooms, forums uniting different interest groups are popping up every day. As kids are eager to discuss their interests with peers, it is important to speak to them about sharing one’s private information. Under no circumstances should they share any pictures, addresses, etc.

11. Email deals are fake! All that sparkles is not gold. If your kids receive an email about a great offer like a free cell phone or concert tickets it’s a trick designed to get one to give up personal information. Again, advise your kids to always show you such emails and never respond to them.

Kids these days are more tech-savvy than most of their parents when they were that age ­but at the same time, they will be exposed to online identity thefts, hackings and snooping if they are not taught basic Internet safety rules from an early age.

via NordVPN

The popular video game The Sims has decided to promote gender fluidity and self-actualization by recently eliminating any and all obstacles to complete gender customization.

In a free update to The Sims 4, publisher Electronic Arts and developer Maxis noted that players would be able to “create Sims with any type of physique, walk style, or voice.” This is a distinct departure from over a decade and a half of Sims’ history, in which characters were restricted by specific clothing, hair styles, and other styling options unique to male or female characters. But now, more than 700 pieces of content that were previously exclusive to either male or female Sims are available to anyone and everyone.

In a statement, Electronic Arts noted that its new move sought to “make sure players can create characters they can identify with or relate to through powerful tools that give them influence over a Sims’ gender, age, ethnicity, body type, and more.”

In an email to The Associated Press, The Sims 4 executive producer Rachel Franklin added that the update, over a year in the making, would allow “female Sims [to] wear sharp men’s suits like Ellen (DeGeneres), and male Sims [to] wear heels like Prince.”

Increasingly, video games have begun to reflect the diversity of its user base. As the New York Times points out, “Fallout 2” and “Fable” have both allowed for same-sex marriage between characters, and games like “Mass Effect” and “Dragon Age” brought LGBT characters onto the scene. And just a few years ago, “The Last of Us” followed the adventures of a gay teenage lead character.

“It has always been important to us to provide our players with powerful ways to express themselves and tell a wide range of stories — whether they’re customizing their Sims’ age, skin color, or gender,” added Franklin.

via Digital Trends

She slides into the car, and even before she buckles her seat belt, her phone is in her hands. A 13-year-old girl after a day of eighth grade.

Her thumb on Instagram. She closes the app. She opens BuzzFeed. She opens Instagram. She opens the NBA app. She shuts the screen off. She turns it back on. She opens Spotify. Opens Fitbit. She has 7,427 steps. Opens Instagram again. Opens Snapchat. She watches a sparkly rainbow flow from her friend’s mouth. She watches a YouTube star make pouty faces at the camera. She watches a tutorial on nail art. She feels the bump of the driveway and looks up. They’re home. Twelve minutes have passed.

Katherine’s iPhone is the place where all of her friends are always hanging out. So it’s the place where she is, too. She’s on it after it rings to wake her up in the mornings. She’s on it at school, when she can sneak it. She’s on it while her 8-year-old sister, Lila, is building crafts out of beads. She sets it down to play basketball, to skateboard, to watch PG-13 comedies and sometimes to eat dinner, but when she picks it back up, she might have 64 unread messages.

Now she’s on it in her living room, while she explains what it’s like to be a 13-year-old today.

“Over 100 likes is good, for me. And comments. You just comment to make a joke or tag someone.”

The best thing is the little notification box, which means someone liked, tagged or followed her on Instagram. She has 604 followers. There are only 25 photos on her page because she deletes most of what she posts. The ones that don’t get enough likes, don’t have good enough lighting or don’t show the coolest moments in her life must be deleted.

“I decide the pictures that look good,” she says. “Ones with my friends, ones that are a really nice-looking picture.”

Somewhere, maybe at this very moment, neurologists are trying to figure out what all this screen time is doing to the still-forming brains of people Katherine’s age, members of what’s known as Generation Z. Educators are trying to teach them that not all answers are Googleable. Counselors are prying them out of Internet addictions. Parents are trying to catch up by friending their kids on Facebook. (P.S. Facebook is obsolete.) Sociologists, advertisers, stock market analysts — everyone wants to know what happens when the generation born glued to screens has to look up and interact with the world.

Right now, Katherine is still looking down.

“See this girl,” she says, “she gets so many likes on her pictures because she’s posted over nine pictures saying, ‘Like all my pictures for a tbh, comment when done.’ So everyone will like her pictures, and she’ll just give them a simple tbh.”

A tbh is a compliment. It stands for “to be heard” or “to be honest.”

Katherine tosses her long brown hair behind her shoulder and ignores her black Lab, Lucy, who is barking to be let out.

“It kind of, almost, promotes you as a good person. If someone says, ‘tbh you’re nice and pretty,’ that kind of, like, validates you in the comments. Then people can look at it and say, ‘Oh, she’s nice and pretty.’ ”

School is where she thrives: She is beloved by her teachers, will soon star as young Simba in the eighth-grade performance of “The Lion King” musical, and gets straight A’s. Her school doesn’t offer a math course challenging enough for her, so she takes honors algebra online through Johns Hopkins University.

Now she’s on her own page, checking the comments beneath a photo of her friend Aisha, which she posted for Aisha’s birthday.

“Happy birthday posts are a pretty big deal,” she says. “It really shows who cares enough to put you on their page.”

Her floor is a tangle of clothes, and her bed is a tangle of cords. One for her phone, one for an iPod, and one for her school laptop.

Her dad wants to figure out how to get her to use her phone less. One month, she ate up 18 gigabytes of data. Most large plans max out at 10. He intervened and capped her at 4 GB.

“I don’t want to crimp it too much,” he says. “That’s something, from my perspective, I’m going to have to figure out, how to get my arms around that.”

He says that a lot. He’s a ­56-year-old corporate lawyer who doesn’t know how to upload photos to his Facebook page. When he was 13, he lived only two miles away. He didn’t have a cellphone, of course, and home phones were reserved for adults. When he wanted to talk to his friends, he rode his bike to their houses. His parents expected him to play outside all day and be back by dinnertime.

Some of Katherine’s very best friends have never been to her house, or she to theirs. To her dad, it seems as if they rarely hang out, but he knows that to her, it seems as if they’re together all the time. He tries to watch what she sends them — pictures of their family skiing, pictures of their cat Bo — but he’s not sure what her friends, or whomever she follows, is sending back.

He checks the phone bill to see who she’s called and how much she’s been texting, but she barely calls anyone and chats mostly through Snapchat, where her messages disappear. Another dad recommended that use of parental controls would stop Katherine from using her phone at night. He put that in place, but it seemed like as soon as he did, there was some reason he needed to switch it off.

Even if her dad tried snooping around her apps, the true dramas of teenage girl life are not written in the comments.

Like how sometimes, Katherine’s friends will borrow her phone just to un-like all the Instagram photos of girls they don’t like. Katherine can’t go back to those girls’ pages and re-like the photos because that would be stalking, which is forbidden.

Or how at the middle school dance, her friends got the phone numbers of 10 boys, but then they had to delete five of them because they were seventh-graders. And before she could add the boys on Snapchat, she realized she had to change her username because it was her childhood nickname, and that was totally embarrassing.

Then, because she changed her username, her Snapchat score reverted to zero. The app awards about one point for every snap you send and receive. It’s also totally embarrassing and stressful to have a low Snapchat score. So in one day, she sent enough snaps to earn 1,000 points.

Snapchat is where flirting happens. She doesn’t know anyone who has sent a naked picture to a boy, but she knows it happens with older girls, who know they have met the right guy.

Nothing her dad could find on her phone shows that for as good as Katherine is at math, basketball and singing, she wants to get better at her phone. To be one of the girls who know what to post, how to caption it, when to like, what to comment.

One afternoon, Katherine accidentally leaves her phone in her dad’s car. She shouldn’t need it while she does her homework, but she reaches for it, momentarily forgetting it’s not next to her on the U-shaped couch.

Her feet are kicked up onto a coffee table, MacBook is on her stomach. She’s working on her capstone project, a 12-page essay and presentation on a topic of her choice. At the beginning of the year, she chose “Photoshop and the media,” an examination of how women are portrayed in magazines.

She types into Google, “How to change Chrome icon.” She finds what she needs in seconds. The icon becomes pink. She flips back to the essay and copies a line into the PowerPoint presentation she will give in front of her classmates.

Photoshop affects women of all ages ranging as young as six and even to women older than 40.

Katherine doesn’t need magazines or billboards to see computer-perfect women. They’re right on her phone, all the time, in between photos of her normal-looking friends. There’s Aisha, there’s Kendall Jenner’s butt. There’s Olivia, there’s YouTube star Jenna Marbles in lingerie.

The whole world is at her fingertips and has been for years. This, Katherine offers as a theory one day, is why she doesn’t feel as if she’s 13 years old at all. She’s probably, like, 16.

“I don’t feel like a child anymore” she says. “I’m not doing anything childish. At the end of sixth grade” – when all her friends got phones and downloaded Snapchat, Instagram and Twitter — “I just stopped doing everything I normally did. Playing games at recess, playing with toys, all of it, done.”

Katherine switches from her essay to Instagram, which she opens in a new tab. There’s a photo of a girl who will go to Katherine’s high school climbing out of a pool. A photo of clouds above a parking lot. A poorly lit selfie. She flips back to her essay. There’s a section about how unrealistic portrayals of women lead to teenage eating disorders.

If you aren’t thin, you aren’t attractive

Being thin is more important than being healthy

Thou shall not eat without feeling guilty

She found the words on a blog encouraging anorexia. Its pages were filled with photos of rail-thin girls and tips for how to stop yourself from eating. If she were to go looking for them, Katherine could find sites like this for bulimia, cutting, suicide – all the dangerous behaviors that are more prominent for teens who have been through trauma. She could scroll through them on her phone, looking no different than when she’s reading a BuzzFeed article.

She copies and pastes some lines from the blog into her presentation. She has never dieted. But for some reason, she says, when she first found this blog, she just couldn’t seem to get it out of her head.

On the morning of her 14th birthday, Katherine wakes up to an alarm ringing on her phone. It’s 6:30 a.m. She rolls over and shuts it off in the dark.

Propping herself up on her peace-sign-covered pillow, she opens Instagram. Her friends will decide whether to post pictures of Katherine for her birthday. Whether they like her enough to put a picture of her on their page. Those pictures, if they come, will get likes and maybe tbhs.

They should be posted in the morning, any minute now. She scrolls past a friend posing in a bikini on the beach. Then a picture posted by Kendall Jenner. A selfie with coffee. A basketball Vine. A selfie with a girl’s tongue out. She scrolls, she waits. For that little notification box to appear.

Story via Washington Post
Photo via Kate Miller/For The Washington Post

AOL.com is shining light on a new social media app that allows girls (and some boys) to lip sync to popular songs – putting words of adults into the mouths of babes – and broadcasting to the world.

All them bitches be my sons but who’s the Daddy? — “I’m Legit”, by Nicki Minaj

Musical.ly may be a relative newcomer to the social media space, but that doesn’t mean that you should underestimate its power. The app allows creators to play around with songs, content, and more with the press of a button. It’s already gained a huge following and has led to some people to find fame on the platform. Fifteen-year-old Ariel Martin (pictured asking “who’s the daddy?”), is better known as Baby Ariel. Baby Ariel has the attention of over 8 million users.

I was 20 years old when Tipper Gore heard Prince sing about masturbation in his song “Darling Nikki”. She quickly formed the “Parents Music Resource Center”, with the goal of increasing parental control over the access of children to music deemed to have violent, drug-related or sexual themes. At the time, I thought she was a buzzkill.

Now that I’m 40 – and a parent – I’m watching, judging, and talking to my young daughter about the content she’s broadcasting via Musical.ly. More than once I’ve cringed at the lyrics and demanded that she not post a song. She understands my concern, but assures me that it’s not about the lyrics. She says she doesn’t listen to the lyrics. I try to compare this to my childhood fascination with Donna Summer, who famously sang about “picking up all kinds of strangers if the price is right”.

However, broadcasting suggestive lyrics to an unknown number of strangers is very different than singing in the privacy of my bedroom. I watch my daughter’s Musical.ly videos before they are posted, and I’ve even appeared in a couple of them. Sometimes she’ll ask about the meaning of a certain phrase or word. A lot of the songs found on Muscical.ly are very explicit, so I treat these instances as learning moments. In response, I’m straight forward. It makes for an uncomfortable minute or two, but I don’t want her to be naive about pop culture – as it inevitably seeps into her mind.

By the way, I’m also looking at the Muscical.ly accounts of her friends – and I’m certain most parents aren’t monitoring their children’s online activity. I’ve recoiled at some of the video content posted by my daughter’s young friends. It’s a strange juxtaposition to view innocent girls lip sync the lyrics, “Real big pretty titty, shut down every city. If you want the kid kitty, gotta get the key from me.”

Do I judge those parents for not monitoring the online activity of their children? You can call me a buzzkill.

via AOL.com