Protecting Children from Harm in the Internet Age

Protecting Children from Harm in the mesh progressYiliang, YinIssues regarding pincerrens lucre safety remained an overarching concern for the society. however as a matter of fact, profit is already an irreplace suitable part of daily life, in particular for children ( matching, gaming, and social net change stateing). The Canadian government has introduced agreements to protect children. Nervertheless, some crimes ar bailiwick basis. In addition, a lot of countries define children differently, sop ups protecting children a harder work Minujin et al. 2006. net profit sifting technology has been conducted in intimately western countries as wellspring as some developing countries. It is enforced to prevent Internet mappingrs from advanceing materials that considered conflicting or unsafe Hamake, 2008. Although pargonnts and local institution are encouraged to design these parcel to protect their children and the fraternity, but in that location is no guarantee that these packet are 100% effective at regulating undesirable contents, they ceaselessly carely to under- or over- wad content. Therefore, besides apply network level filtering, it is faultfinding for parents, education- and government-related military unit to cultivate children some self-protection, risks and duty they whitethorn encounter darn exploitation the Internet.1. INTRODUCTIONInternet has aim one of the intimately main(prenominal) media among the opposites. Common uses of net profit among good deal including children areLeaningSocial-networkingEntertainingThe ontogenesis of technology makes Internet usage more convenient. Children are now able to access profit from their cellphone, tablet and laptop instead of desktop reckoners. But this made supervision much more difficult than in front Lopez, Arnao and Puente, 2012. succession the meshwork is overall a great educational place for children, on that point are also exist areas that are not attach for child ren. With egress fascinate supervision, children are analogously to land contacted by contents involving violence, porn, hate speech, and so onAlthough thither exist unsafe contents on the net income, but internet itself is a powerful tool. The internet softens parents and educators separate opportunity to determine children fit to their age and interest, full-grown children better way of learning while having fun.Parents, education- and government-related personnel should work together in order to constitute a safer milieu for children. It is everyones responsibility to institute and maintain a healthy surround for children wherever they are, giving children a safe and nurturing childhood.2. Children Internet Useboth the amount of children and their ability to use internet are increasing. roughly parents maintain they dont know better than their child active the internet. agree to a survey conducted by the pan-European survey published by the European Commission, ch ildren start to use the Internet at 7, and the age of internet user is decreasing, internet uses include social-networking (89%), entertaining (84%) and shallowwork (80%) Digital Agenda, 2010. Therefore, building safe guidepost and setting rules for childrens internet usage should start once they get contact with computer.An important role of enabling childrens safety online is to answer them understand the concepts of safety and risks, so that they will be able to make better decisions in the future ground on what they shake up known. Internet safety education is critical in protecting children from internet threats.Some citizenry blocked childrens internet usage completely, claiming it as an despicable thing, which will misguide the children. They should also keep in mind that internet use is one of the basic skills in daily life. In addition, children learn from their mis conduces. Therefore, it is the goal to teach children the internet manner and look before you leap ou t.3. Potential Risks jibe to research, children between ages of 8-15 are mostly likely to be afflicted by online threats. Some are risky to their safety and privacy some may also resulted from children intentionally or unintentionally violates the truth, much(prenominal) as torts which may lead to d cholerous situations. Figure 1 shows the overview of vulgar internet risks from Valcke et al. (2011)Fig. 1. Overview of internet RisksFile-sharing is a profitable technology that appropriates teachers to show useful education to the schoolchild and peers to share files with each other. But many file-sharing programs, like email, give children a way of accessing harmful contents. Example of such contents including pornography, violence, hate, racism. According to research from Valkenburg and Soeters (2001), figure 2 shows data from childrens compulsive experience of using internet, and figure 3 shows negative experience.Fig. 2. Positive Impacts about childrens Internet UseFig. 3 . Negative Impacts about childrens Internet UseWhile children are searching movie clips, some sexually explicit files or sites advocate usage of alcohol, tobacco or ill-gotten drugs may appear. In this case, some online filter or parent-control software post be used.The most common contact risks to think of is a child turn up missing or being hurt aft(prenominal) meeting someone online. This always resulted by young children especially girls allured by criminals online.There are many ways internet users outhouse pretermit their privacy, and leading themselves to danger. If children carelessly exposed family address, phone number, or name to a stranger, serious danger may occur to family members as well. Besides, nowadays there are a lot of companies collecting potential customers entropy as registering for contests or filling address for prize, children should also be aware of giving out information this way, causing mental and property damage.It is not just now our privacy w e need to consider. Parents should also be aware their children putting other peoples information (e.g. booster rocket, other family members, etc.) online. Making jokes as claiming a missing child by putting a friends information online commode cause a lot of trouble to the family and police. raft get angry sometimes, same for children. A lot of people take internet as a way to vent the anger. Children will endure higher chance to be exposed to hate speech and savage sentence when get involved. The best defense for children is to avoid getting into online arguments until they are mature enough to filter out bad information, control the anger and speak out their minds.The lack of uniform definition as what is appropriate for children or what is the definition of children are different in most countries establish on their culture. Most developed countries take 18 years centenarian as the boundary to differentiate adults from children. But people get tie early in some country so they arrive their adulthood much earlier. In this case, the lack of uniform online legislation may allow children to access inappropriate material from other countries.4. Present Concerns and SolutionsAlong with the increase of childrens internet use, a large number of Web 2.0 applications like Facebook came out, which makes it now more critical to protect children from unsafe online milieu.There are three aspects need to be worked with government regulation, technologies, parents supervision.4.1 Government Policies regarding Childrens Online gum elasticAccording to Liu (2006), Ontario police established the earliest investigation group about child pornography. The investigators realized shortly, child pornography exists not only in certain places, it became an issue of the world. Online investigation needs a lot of time, capital and human resources, especially skilled investigators. So the local police come out founded an Internet Safety Committee, formed by police representa tives, governors from election, members from the local educational activity Committee, etc., and their goal is to nominate the safest online environment as they endure for children.To accomplish the goal, the citizens delegacy established the following detailed rules educate students about the importance of internet safety teach the parents how to protect their children from internet risks. The committee worked with one school and added specific course about Internet Safety for students with different age. An redress company donated a disk with video about Internet Risks to the committee made the education process ran smoother than before.According to the research before experiment, 62% of elementary students were using internet in the spare time, and 23.7% of the student have visited online chatting rooms. For students in grade 9 and grade 10, 88.6% of them have worn-out(a) spare time online, 66.19% students have chatted online within the last 6 months. The most disturbing r esult is that there were 90.5% of students thought it is alright to meet people that they met online, and 22% had already met their net friend.The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) of get together States had revised Childrens Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) on July 1, 2013. COPPA give US-parents greater control over their childrens privacy. It detailed what a meshingsite manipulator must follow, when and how to seek permission and verification from a parent to shielder, and what responsibility an operator has to protect childrens privacy and safety online, including restrictions on doing commercial enterprise with children under 13.4.2 Internet Filtering TechnologyA lot of countries have elect to establish national internet regulation with varying degrees of success, but sometimes will have unintended consequences. Number of countries who use filtering technologies to block the access of certain content has increased dramatically.Normally, the following threes filtering tech nologies are used to block the access of websites via network infrastructure IP blocking, DNS filtering, and URL blocking using a proxy. Filters can also be implemented by using software on local computers, in other words, client-side filters. This type of filter can be managed by anyone with administrator-level privileges on the computer.It can be argued that net-work based filtering causes filtering errors over-blocking and under-blocking. For example, when searching health-related information, some useful information may be filtered out by having same searching keywords with porn-related material. And most of the filtering software will select over-blocking instead of allowing any leaking information that their customers dont want. As a result, over-blocking encourages users to bypass the filtering technology entirely. When new information is updated online, under-blocking may occur. The filtering software may fail to recognise the new information because it has not yet updated on the client side when blacklisting are used instead of whitelisting.With the rapid cultivation of science and technology, people expect higher efficiency for their software. It has been reported that most inline filters (parent-control software) as well as online content filtering are slow when processing. According to Akbas (2008), content filtering can be accelerated by examining only web content. In this case, offline filtering and proxy works synergistic, so filtering process and data take away works independently to accelerate the filtering process. Therefore, decision can be made by examining only part of the web content.While childrens internet use at school or home is usually supervise and filtered, many children are now able to access internet done other devices and in different locations with no supervision and internet filter. This means, children are likely to access inappropriate material on the internet. It is therefore, important to educate children how to behav e online, and discuss issues that may encounter when accessing Internet.4.3 Parents and Educators ActionWhen the government toilsome to enact laws to protect children as complete as possible, parents and other community members in the society also have the responsibility to guide children, provide a safe and entertained online environment for them.Except using filtering technologies, parents and educators should teach children how to safeguard themselves, since the most effective way of preventing problems arising from internet use is to clothe children. Guardians and educators can teach them about legal boundaries, moral and ethical norms regarding their culture. Empowering children can prevent them from being victims as well.It is undeniable that children adapt new technologies better than adults. This made a good relation with children much important, since young people usually will have a bank relationship with peers or adults, so the influencers should be aware of the risks themselves and give reliable advices. In addition, parents, guardians, educators and trusted influencers should play an active role in teaching children about the risks they may face from sexually explicit materials online and how to avoid internet predators and scammers. Children should also be educated about being careful of sharing personal information on the internet.As children growing up day by day, parents guardian role becomes challenging. While parents are being responsible for their childrens safety, they have to respect childrens rights to privacy themselves. Parents readiness give up at this them, but it is urgent to encourage parents to talk and discuss with children about their online activity.(what the parents can do are communicate with children as much as they can make sure the children understand the importance of not exposing private information to strangers make sure they dont meet net friend if found anything that children did were not appropriate online, stop them, and educate them put the computer at where you can see easily use parents control software)5. ConclusionsInternet control is not impossible. Along working with children in their families and schools, there are a lot of actions that government can do to build public awareness to help children be benefit from the internet in a safe environment. For example, involve all members in the society to build public awareness about internet safety encourage law enforcement and the educational department to develop best practices in proving safe online environment and dealing with crimes.The internet renovates so rapidly that the government regulation and technologies might not keep up. More effective and durable measures are those resolve to children family, school, and community, guiding children to make good decisions, so that they will grow to become the next generation of responsible and trusted influencers.REFERENCEShttp//refworks.scholarsportal.info.proxy.bib.uottawa.ca/refworks2/ default.aspx?r=fileget_filefile_name=yyin051-RefList.htmlcontent_type= text edition/htmlfile_token=WWFvJ8ccM8n3WWpZKOfcZRsWMbn0Mo5vMb5yMoefNE90J8e0GApnVtWZhkcUCdGtA1T8c4E. Akbas. 2008. Next Generation Filtering Offline Filtering Enhanced Proxy Architecture for Web centre Filtering. In Computer and Information Sciences, 2008. 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