February 9th is Safer Internet Day — Think B4 U Post!

February 9^th has been dubbed Safer Internet Day, and is organized each year by INSAFE to promote the safe and responsible use of online technology and cell phones. Now in its 7^th year, Safer Internet Day is being celebrated in more than 60 countries across all 5 continents around the world.

This year’s theme is “Think B4 U Post!”  Hundreds of online and offline activities taking place today are designed to increase kids’ awareness for the consequences of cyber bullying, sexting, and sharing personal information online.

Instead of preventing kids from using these sites, the goal of Safer Internet Day is to “make them aware of the risks of sharing personal information online and to encourage them to control their online identity by thinking carefully about the consequences.”  The site offers links to resources for children, parents and teachers, along with creative videos that reinforce online ethics and responsibility to help prevent it from happening in the first place.

Sometimes kids get carried away and don’t realize that what they do or say online can have consequences in real life. Once an image is posted on a social networking site or profile, it’s difficult—if not downright impossible—to take it down.

As a parent, what can you do if your child’s photos or personal information suddenly appears online?

Family Circle magazine tackled this topic in the October 17th issue, offering practical advice to help minimize harm when a teen shares private information online. Start by confirming whether your son or daughter was the source of the information. Next, conduct searches on sites like Google, Bing and pipl.com to see what’s publicly available.

Family Circle also recommends parents “install monitoring software like Spector Pro” to capture usernames and passwords, and fix the situation so others can’t find it online later.

When it comes to keeping kids safe online, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. We recommend installing Spector Pro and eBlaster on your child’s PC or Mac and start monitoring their online activity before something bad happens. Here’s why:

Spector Pro and eBlaster let you see everything your kids do on the computer, every minute they’re on it. What they’re seeing on their friends’ Facebook and MySpace pages, terms they’re searching on or using in chat, and what’s being said about them and to them by others—whether you’re at home or working late in the office. With Spector Pro’s industry leading screen snapshot feature, you can see everything they do in a “rewind and play” sequence, in the exact order they do it, step by step.

By watching and engaging your kids about specific situations, you can help them learn to exercise self-control, resist or report cyberbullying, make trusted friends online, and make smarter decisions. The products can inform you of sudden changes in a child’s interests (like Internet searches on the word “suicide” or “zerg”, which means “to gang up on someone”) that stem from cyberbullying. It can also warn you if an online pen-pal is daring them to be risky and do something like GNOC (get naked on camera).

SpectorSoft’s built-in filters, tools and control settings help you become more “Net savvy” in creating a safer online environment for your child. For example, the 2010 version of Spector Pro for Windows includes an Internet Chat Lingo translator that defines common acronyms like POS (Parents Over Shoulder) and MIRL (Meet in Real Life) that appear in chat conversations, and now lets you block specific individuals from chatting with them altogether.

You can download “A Parent’s Guide to Internet Lingo” and take our online Lingo Quiz at: www.FreeLingoGuide.com or watch a detailed video here: http://www.spectorsoft.com/mkt/consumervid-bare.html.

Most importantly, if you need to intervene and correct a situation gone wrong, you’ll already have the necessary tools, logins and passwords of your child’s social networking profiles and email accounts to act quickly to remove unwanted content, and identify other kids who may be contributing to the situation.

Chances are, if you’re proactively monitoring what they’re saying and seeing online, you are far more likely to prevent the situation from happening in the first place–which is the mission of Safer Internet Day: “to help contribute to making the online world a safe and secure environment that everyone can enjoy” (and kids can enjoy safely).

Now that’s something to celebrate!