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Safety for your children online

You may date online… Make sure your children don’t!

It’s very easy for children to gain access to computers or laptops in the home nowadays. If you have children in your home and use online dating sites, (or any other type of adult site) make sure your machines are secured.

You can’t monitor every minute of your childs online activities, however, online threats are ever present and real.

What are the dangers?

Most children are first exposed to pornography while they are still under 11 years old.

An unsolicited image could be the beginning of a long term battle with porn addiction.

In 2014, one in five children under the age of 17 have were asked if they would participate in some form of sexual act online.  Over three quarters of these children never tell their parents about this.

Over half of all children have accidentally accessed inappropriate material online.

Using the internet without some kind of protection can very quickly lead to sexual predation, identity theft, cyber-bullying and all forms of social networking dangers, not withstanding viruses and malicious software threats.

Children are not generally malicious but they can be very curious and are usually trusting and can easily get into trouble online without any awareness of the consequences. They need protection from both others and themselves.

If you have left your login details to hand your accounts could easily be compromised. If you use auto-login to get online, your children could also do the same.

Below, we list the applications which we recommend you use if you have children under the age of 18 in the house and who access the internet.

The following sites and software systems are recommended not just for preventing your childrens access to dating sites but when using the internet in general.

All protection software will help to protect against:

  1. Online Predators
  2. Pornography
  3. Cyber Bullying
  4. Social Network Dangers
  5. Internet Addiction
  6. Viruses and malicious software

NetNanny

CyberPatrol

CyberSitter

InternetMatters

ChildNet

Norton Family

All the above programmes will help to block pornographic and other inappropriate web sites, help you set time limits on your childrens computer games and Internet usage, help you to control access to games and instant messaging and allow you to always know where your kids are when they’re online.