In the coming years, however, more and more of our data will be available from the clues we give on social networking sites, better technology will be able to interpret it and more media platforms will have access to it and the information we are posting on the web now is going to be caught up in that ‘data machine’. For example, I did a brief audit of what I could find on myself on the web, just from basic Google searches on blog posts I have done and social network sites I belong to. What I found was quite unnerving.
Just from basic searches the information you can find on me is: Name, email, address, son’s name, wife’s name, the bank that I bank with, days when I have traveled, where my favorite drinking haunt is, the airlines I fly, the airline miles clubs I belong to, my political affiliations and my fitness routine and where I go.
I don’t mind telling you, that is pretty scary and I am someone who tries to make sure that my data is not widely distributed!
For me, however, I am not too worried. I am aware of identity theft I have protocols in place with my bank that would foil any attempt to use the information above to ’steal’ my identity, but it is not really me I am worried about, it is my son, my nieces and nephews.
The fact that this much information can be found out about me, and I am cautious, made me look into the stuff I could find out about my nephews (my son has been watched over on the net since he was ten), and I found out a lot that they would not want their ‘Uncle Dave’ knowing.
This information, that has innocently been posted on the Web over the last 5 years, is nothing so salacious that it is an overt worry, but what if an employer were to find those pictures of my nephew dressed as the Joker, drink in hand flicking the bird at the camera? What about the one, when he was younger, where he is dressed as a Nazi? Taken out of context this could be damaging, even his (truthful) protestations of it being a shot of him after his appearance in the school version of ‘The Sound Of Music’ may fall on deaf ears and lose him that job or have him rejected from a college.
For us, as parents, to think that employers and colleges are not researching applicants online from their social network profiles is, frankly, naive.
What is the solution, ban our kids from social networking? We all know that is a draconian way of solving the issue and one which would take away an important element of our children’s social lives. There, however, an alternative.
Koini are providers of Internet safety solutions for parents and their kids. The Koini Browser is a downloadable free browser that has a ‘white list’ of sites that parents can update as well as Koini themselves which can be controlled by age. If you have a 7 year old that you only want to see a certain sites and a 14 year that has a wider range you can input those parameters in the parental control dashboard.
Expanding upon that theme, Koini have launched the Koini Club (www.koiniclub.com) that is a social network with multiple functionality of both Facebook and Myspace, but with Instant Messaging etc. The juice here, for parents, is that all of these functions and features are protected by the parameters a parent sets. So if you only want you 10 year old talking to other 10 year old’s on the network then you input that in your parental control dashboard and your kid won’t even see anyone on the network who is not ten.
This element of protection is fantastic, but more importantly it operates as tool for parents to teach their kids responsible social networking and while they are learning their information is total private.
Non of the information on the Koini Club is public, non of it can be searched by the search engines and no pictures chat or information will ever be available for scrutiny in the years to come, because it is behind this wall of privacy.
This kind of privacy is something that will become more valued in the years to come when our teenagers realize that some of the information on the web that they exuberantly posted a few year before has come back to haunt them min their college and job seeking years.
Fortunately when I was a teenager, there were no phone cameras, no digital cameras and no instant distribution of embarrassing moments on YouTube. Looking back at the things I got up to, this is a very, very good thing that they are buried in childhood history, I now see it as my duty to make sure my son has the same opportunity to bury his childhood follies and not have them follow him around in his digital footprint.
Oh…. and there is one just for parents too….(www.koinicafe.com)..
