Watch Your Facebook Invites

July 27, 2011 Leave a Comment

Do your kids use the “invitation” feature on Facebook to spread the word about parties and events with their friends? If so, make sure they know how to use the feature properly – or they could be putting themselves at risk.

Facebook invitations are fairly simple to use, and can be sent to anyone with a Facebook account or email address. Click “events” from your home account page and fill in the date and location, upload an optional picture, and customize the privacy level of your event (public or private.) The important part is this: don’t forget to triple-check the privacy level!

Last month a German teen identified as Thessa invited friends to her 16th birthday party using Facebook, but she forgot to mark the invitation as “private.” The result? The invitation went viral, causing 1,600 people to flood her street on the day of the party – even though Thessa later realized her mistake and cancelled the event. The police were called in to handle the crowd, and Thessa (who was nowhere to be found) had a very unhappy birthday.

Thessa’s real-life faux pas was preceded by a similar occurrence last year in Australia (which luckily turned out to be a hoax.) Facebook invitations for Kate Miller’s birthday went viral and Facebook ended up closing down the event after over 60,000 people RSVP’d.

What’s fortunate is that “Kate Miller” wasn’t a real person and that Thessa wasn’t hurt because of inviting the entire Facebook world to her house. But it serves as a reminder to you and your teens to be extra-careful with privacy settings on the Internet – that “private” button is easy to miss, but it’s vital when you’re giving out personally identifying information in an invitation!

Creative Commons License
Watch Your Facebook Invites by Tim Woda is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

Filed under Facebook, General, Web 2.0 Tagged with ,

Facebook’s New Video Chat Feature

July 20, 2011 1 Comment

Video Chat Comes to Facebook

In an age where everyone has a social networking account and Facebook is the primary mode of communication for people (especially young people,) it was only a matter of time before Facebook introduced the ability to video chat.

Rolled out earlier this month, the new Facebook video chat feature is powered by Skype, which has enabled users to make free video calls since 2003. Facebook video chat allows you to connect to anyone on your “friends” list right from your Facebook account, and if they’re not there you can leave them a video message.

All it requires is a webcam and a simple plug in installation, and you can be chatting away with anyone you choose in no time.

This is a cool, exciting feature. Now your kids can keep in touch with friends who’ve moved away as if they still lived next door to each other. They can call home from college without paying long-distance charges – and since they’re already on Facebook anyway, they may be more likely to stay in touch.

However, as with any new technology Facebook video chat is subject to the obvious forms of abuse. Adding a video feature to the social network where your children and their peers already hang out opens the door for ramped-up video sexting (instead of just pictures) or your child becoming a target of even more in-your-face cyberbullying or sexual harassment.

Ask your teen today if they know about or are interested in Facebook video chat, and whether their friends use it. Talk about your expected guidelines for use of this feature before it becomes an issue, and as always, monitor their use on a regular basis.

Creative Commons License
Facebook’s New Video Chat Feature by Tim Woda is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

Filed under Facebook, Video, Web 2.0 Tagged with , ,

Parents’ Guide to Neopets

February 10, 2011 1 Comment

This post originally appeared on www.kidsafe.me.

Sort of a Tamagotchi-Pokémon hybrid, Neopets is an online game where players earn and spend virtual Neopoints to customize and care for up to 4 colorful cartoon animals.

Neopets launched in 1999 as a gaming site for bored college students, and today there are more teens and adults on Neopets than there are on comparable sites like Webkinz or Club Penguin.

After registering (kids under 13 must do so with a parent’s email), players can buy clothes, food, toys, and even houses for their Neopets. They can also track their Neopet’s stats as they train it to fight other virtual animals in the Battledome.

Many people can and do play Neopets for free (there is no fee for signing up), but a lot of the games and items can only be accessed by spending Neocash – which is bought via PayPal with real-life money. Gambling-esque games to win Neopoints (betting, scratch cards, spinning a wheel) are present, but are only open to kids over 13.

Parents sometimes complain about the overwhelming saturation of off-site ads on Neopets.com – ads are easy to click by mistake and hard for a young child to differentiate from the game. (You can get rid of the ads, but only with a Neopets Premium membership that costs $7.99 a month.)

Unlike other virtual world online games, Neopets doesn’t focus on social networking. In fact, there is minimal interaction among Neopets players. The main form of communication is through message boards, which are open to ages 13+ only. In the message boards, players are represented by Neopets avatars and can “friend” others, block users from contacting them, or send private messages to each other with NeoMail.

Neopets messages boards are automatically filtered for profanity and overseen by live moderators. Discussing dating and romance, religion, or politics can be grounds for getting your account “frozen.”

Though it might seem like a child-oriented site because of its cartoon graphics, Neopets is actually most appropriate for kids over the age of 12 or 13. Not only does it require fluent reading, but some of the concepts involved (such as investing in the stock market) are difficult for younger kids to grasp.

by Jenny Evans

Filed under Gaming, Social Networking, Web 2.0 Tagged with , , ,

Kids Cyberbullying Teachers: Facebook Hate Groups and More

February 3, 2011 1 Comment

This post originally appeared on www.kidsafe.me.

If you think that only kids that are the victim of cyberbullying, think again. Teachers can also become the targets of cyberbullying by their own students. In particular, Facebook hate groups aimed at a particular teacher are increasingly common.

In 2007, a Florida high schooler was suspended for creating a Facebook group called “Ms. Sarah Phelps is the worst teacher I’ve ever met!” She sued the school, claiming that creating the group was within her legal free speech rights. She won.

It may be legal, but it’s not nice – and it’s not smart, either.

Kids need to understand that what they type doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Whatever they put online can be seen by anybody – including the person they are ridiculing. Not only can it be devastating to the victim, but it reflects really poorly on the perpetrator, too.

When a college admissions officer or future potential employer Googles your child’s name and finds profanity-ridden personal attacks they wrote, how will that shape their impression of your child’s overall character?

With all its conveniences and opportunities, the Internet has let our kids down in the sense that it’s given them a false sense of reality.

When a child is out in the real world, he can’t publicly defame his boss and expect no consequences to come from it. Whether it’s just a tenser work atmosphere or something as serious as getting fired, the consequence will come.

Kids need to learn that lesson now, before they get out in the real world and have to figure it out on their own.

Parents, teach your kids to be nice online. Some teachers are incompetent, nerdy, or just plain mean. But in life you’ve got to learn to get along with all kinds of people – and that doesn’t include creating a Facebook group dedicated to ripping them to shreds.

by Jenny Evans

Filed under Cyberbullying, Facebook, Legal Tagged with , ,

Social Networking Privacy

January 23, 2011 1 Comment

You don’t need an expert to tell you that you lived a different childhood than your kids do. You remember when you had to get up and turn the dial on the TV to change channels; your teen can’t understand how a world without Facebook or MySpace would even function.

You perceive everything differently than your child, and that includes the very nature of social networking.

As adults and non-Facebook natives, we naturally approach social networking with more caution and more discretion. We are well aware that it is a public activity. We parents are more likely to view Facebook as more of a billboard-type communication than a conversation with a friend. But do our kids?

Actually, the way tweens and teens see social networking is vastly different than the way we do. They have grown up with all kinds of ways to talk with their friends – texting, instant messaging, MySpace – and they don’t really differentiate between those ways and face-to-face conversations.

Of course most teens understand that technically, a Facebook conversation isn’t the same as having a private conversation. Even so, it probably doesn’t feel different to your teen – and that’s why you must talk about never sharing any personal information over a social networking medium. And if you’ve already talked about it, talk about it again.

Kids don’t see social networking sites as a platform to broadcast themselves as much as they see it as an extension of everyday life and conversation. Once they let down their guard, they can become vulnerable to safety threats like identity theft or physical harm if they let their personal information slip.

MySpace and Facebook are how our tweens and teens talk to each other. It’s our job not to curb their use, but to help our kids make these social networking sites part of their lives in a safe and positive way.

This post was contributed by Jenny Evans and originally appeared on www.kidsafe.me.

 

Filed under Social Networking Tagged with , , ,

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