Internet Safety

There has been an enormous growth of ‘social networking’ on the Internet.  This involves users putting a profile of themselves onto a website and then keeping in contact with friends via this website.  This profile page can contain photos, personal information, likes and dislikes, messages, ‘blogs’ and polls for other users to vote on.  The most popular sites include bebo.com, MySpace.com, tribe.net, xanga.com, facebook.com and gizoogle.com.   Bebo, in particular, is of concern as it uses school names as a means of connecting users.  Anybody can join any school whether they attended it or not!

These websites are blocked in the College under the Schools Broadband Initiative.  However, it has come to our attention that these sites are being readily accessed by students, from home or other computers.  There are inherent dangers involved with these websites.  The possibility of cyber bullying can occur. Cyber bullying involves the use of information and communication technologies such as e-mail, mobile phone and text messages, instant messaging, defamatory personal Web sites, and defamatory online personal polling Web sites, to support deliberate, repeated, and hostile behaviour by an individual or group, which intends to harm others.  This can be through photographs being published without a person’s permission, edited photographs using an image-editing programme, messages posted on blogs or simply from one user to another.  The language or images used can be of a lewd or inappropriate nature.  There is also the danger of impersonation – you do not know who exactly a person is or what age they are.  They could be pretending to be someone else.

This is a very serious matter for parents.  All parents should monitor their child’s use of the internet and the social networking sites mentioned above.  Most computers come with anti-virus and Internet security packages (such as Norton Internet Security, Cyber Patrol, Cyber Sitter, Net Nanny to name a few).  Parents should familiarise themselves with these.  Using an Internet security package, parents can block access to certain sites.  If you are unsure of how to block sites, you should contact the place where you purchased your computer, where there should be someone with the knowledge of how to do this.  Advice is also available from the National Centre for Technology in Education (NCTE), which looks after the Schools IT Initiative. Links to relevant advice are provided below:

http://www.webwise.ie
http://www.ncte.ie/InternetSafety
http://www.ncte.ie/InternetSafety/Advice
http://www.ncte.ie/InternetSafety/Advice/Filtering/
http://www.ncte.ie/ICTAdviceSupport/AdviceSheets/InternetSafety
http://www.ncte.ie/AbouttheNCTE/Publications/Articles/esociety/
http://www.saferinternet.org