“Don’t write it down if you don’t want anyone to find out about it.”
It was advice well-meaning adults gave to this writer in junior high, back before SnapChat when the notes we passed were intercepted by our teachers. Sometimes these were innocent, others included inappropriate sketches of teacher’s faces and insulting comments. Still others declared our admiration for certain females in the class, admiration we would rather have kept to ourselves.
This advice has been proven over and over, as parents discovered and read journals and diaries, and politicians have been caught by leaked memos and correspondence. If it’s written down, someone will read it.
Credit: Wikimedia
Enter the world of email and electronic communication. Communication that seems ethereal and anonymous is out there, pixels in a cloud that don’t seem as “real” as ink on paper. Hackers have proven this to be untrue. If you sent it electronically it is out there somewhere, on a server, and someone can access it and use it for their own purposes.
The 2016 campaign teaches us that we don’t learn from this even as adults. Despite Edward Snowden and stories of hackers around the world, Hillary Clinton and the Democratic party are both rocked by email scandals, one from her time as secretary of state and the other related to her campaign and Bernie Sanders.
You’d think we would learn, but we don’t. The truth is, according to a 2013 Norton Report outlined in an article titled “The Modern Thief” each piece of information a cybercriminal can steal from you is worth a certain amount of money on the black market. Mobile computing is considered to be a major weakness since many people leave their phones unsecured and use public Wifi on a regular basis.
We can use these current events and the threat of internet privacy to teach our kids the modern variation of “Don’t write it down if you don’t want someone to read it.”
Use Your Phone Carefully
If you don’t have parental controls or some kind of tracking on your kid’s phone, shame on you. It does not matter whether they are eight or sixteen, tracking is not spying on them, it is protecting their privacy and their identity.
Parental monitoring is not enough. You need to teach your kids about the dangers of using unlocked mobile phones on public wifi. Crossing devices to perform tasks is common, especially for digital natives who might start a task or game on their phone and pick it up on their iPad when they get home. Not only are marketers using this cross device behavior to sell things to your kids, but cyber criminals are using it to steal information from one device by using another connected device.
Email and the Cloud are Not Private
You can store email and other information on the cloud. That makes it safe, right? Not really. There is no cloud, it is really just someone else’s computer, their server. All a hacker needs is your password or a way to figure it out, and all of that data is theirs. IT support companies like Netzen, which provide tech support to a number of businesses in the UK to provide business support for SME’s, profess that there are only a countable number of companies that have impenetrable cloud services.
Teens are easy victims, as they tend to use simple passwords, believing no one else will try to get into their stuff, or try to figure out their passwords. However, access to a social security number and birthdate is all a criminal needs to cause some serious havoc. It’s also then easily possible to be faced with charges of computer crime, and if you are ever in that position then you should certainly contact a lawyer who works in computer crime, as that experience that they have will come in very useful.
Teach kids about using complex passwords, and not the same one for every account. Teach them ways to keep them private, and to change them often. Telegram account hack is possible using a phone spy app.
Social Media is a Gateway
Social media is not private either, and is a gateway to other personal information, not to mention the potential harm a criminal can do by simply knowing where your kids are or will be, and when.
You should have their passwords and access to their accounts, but also you should educate them on the only privacy policy they need to know about social media or the internet: If you put it on the internet, it isn’t private.
The news isn’t all bad. Although the current email controversies in the news are public and ugly, they can be used to teach our kids about safety and maintaining their security and privacy.