Safer Internet For Kids

Do you ever wonder what all those acronyms your children are using online mean? Let’s face it. It’s not possible to know every acronym and terms used online and still have a life. Thankfully, there’s a place you can go to quickly look up what those terms and words mean and if you should be concerned or worried. NetLingo is like a virtual Internet Lingo Dictionary. It even has a special section just for parents. They cover all kinds of terms and acronyms
that might come in useful for other areas in our tech centered life.

Technorati Tags: internet, lingo, parenting, safety

I’m a part of a very tight knit group of moms and I trust many of these women, a few of them have even become close friends and business partners who handle my money and my business every day and every month. Recently, a few of us got together since they lived close to each other. This kinda started a thread in our private forums where everyone is so we could maybe get together.

It’s totally innocent and quite harmless. One suggested we create a map so it’s easier for us to visualize and create these local chapters so to speak. So, I thought I’d be the one to do so. Well… while I was creating that map, it kinda hit me square in the face. What if my kids were creating maps that are perfectly harmless like this one? Do I really want people to know where we live exactly? Especially in a small town where we live… even the ZIP is a little too close for comfort.

With that in mind, I set out to examine the features of this mapping site, Frappr. There doesn’t seem to be any settings to make the map private or by invite only. You can take the map off the directory but still, if you post the link to the map in a public site it’s pretty much wide open.

Guess mapping is another one of those things we need to add to that already long list of ‘rules’.

OK, I’ll admit that is not true but this is just another great example of how the laws badly need re-shaping for the world we live in today. In Pennsylvania, a man’s conviction for possession of child pornography was thrown out by Pennsylvania Superior Court because the man didn’t know his browser cache saves the images onto his hard drive. The court says he unknowingly possessing child pornography.

So, in a way isn’t that saying it’s OK to view child porn as long as you turn off your browser cache? Then, you wouldn’t knowingly possess any of the smut. Hmm… as bad as that sounds, in a way an innocent could also be harmed if we looked at this the other way around. What if, Joe invited ‘Jack’ (characters fictional) to my house for a few days. In that time, he used Joe’s computer to child porn but Joe had no knowledge about it. Police come storming in for whatever reason and finds the images in his computer
cache. Does that mean Joe is guilty? Of course not.

We don’t know if this man was actually caught in that scenario but that can happen to anyone. I don’t know, as ridiculous as the law sounds it also makes some sense. I guess it all boils down to smart police work which is frustrating. What would you suggest?

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