Internet Safety

For my 30 minutes of learning about internet safety I signed up for I-SAFE. Wow - I couldn't believe how intense the website is, and was really impressed with how committed they are to educating students and parents about internet safety. It is a big deal - and it should be a big deal. I'm really glad that there are people out there working hard to educate everyone about how to be safe.

As for teaching about internet safety, I taught my husband. I was lacking time and so were my parents, so I went with the next best thing :)

It was a really good lesson - just like in our class there were things that surprised him about internet safety that he hadn't ever realized. Three of those things were "bcc" option on emails, blogging safety and privacy, and the importance of keeping information safe and professional on facebook.

I started teaching him about email and his eyes started to glaze over a bit, but then I mentioned that there was a way to keep his friends and family's email information safe. We talked about what "cc" and "bcc" mean, and what each one does and why that is important. I was surprised that no one had ever told him before about those options, and why they were so beneficial.

When we started talking about blogging and I used some of the examples from the in-class slideshow of tips from the Ensign. I mentioned that blogs have a variance of privacy settings, from being public and viewable through a basic Google search, to being public but only viewable with the right url, to being completely private with readers requiring invitations to read the posts. I told him that our family blog is public so friends of friends can read it, but not searchable so complete strangers couldn't find it. We were able to discuss perhaps going private after we have children, and why. It was a good discussion about the availablity of blogs.

The last thing that was most interesting to him was how many employers will check facebook, myspace, and google for potential employee information. It made both of us think about our facebook pages and what it said about us, and how we could present better images of ourselves. My husband was especially interested in this because he will be going into business, and wants to make sure that he is very well portrayed publicly.

All in all it was a good lesson, albeit non-formal.

Our lesson, the lesson I taught, and the things that I saw when I was looking at internet safety really made me reconsider what I put online. I've been very free - I googled my name and my address came up from a friend's group wedding announcement page. I will never post to group pages again!!! Good thing we're moving . . . yikes. I have even done the phone number and address change, because now I'm thinking more about why someone would need that info and how they could use it.

All in all, I feel much wiser.