Unsupervised Kids Online
Why letting kids play with technology can be as dangerous as leaving them alone in a playground.
Tom Arnold, CISSP, ISSMP, CFA, CISA, GCFE, GBFE, GNFA, GWEB,
Adjunct Professor UNLV Cybersecurity graduate program
Author: The Digital Detective: First Intervention
The last thing many parents think about is how to keep young teens and pre-teens safe online. At a crowded restaurant, many parents pass out iPads or phones to their young teens as pacifiers, just keep them entertained and quiet. The last thing anyone wants is to deal with siblings acting up in public spaces. It’s embarrassing, distracting to parents and others, but it’s also dangerous. Years ago, moms would drop their kids off at a playground as they went shopping with instructions to come home when the streetlights come on. This was common practice. As a parent or grandparent, would you do this today?
Imagine you’re on that family trip with your spouse, young teen daughter, and 9-year-old son. Never fail, the kids are boisterous at dinnertime, and all you want is a nice, quiet family meal. Out comes the iPad for the little one, and the young teen is told to stop pestering her kid brother and do whatever she does with her phone. Mom logs the iPad into the restaurant’s open WiFi (this alone can bring a host of problems not the least of which is knowing that it’s a network really run by the restaurant, or that some Internet interloper could be watching the network traffic). The noise and cries from the young ones stop. Well, that worked.
Let’s consider the iPad in the hands of the young boy. He signs into an online game, restores a recent session, and begins playing with others online. This is his current favorite game. You’re savvy and have set all the Parental Controls in the game, and you feel that this is a harmless activity. Unbeknownst to mom, an avatar appears in the kid’s game and holds up a sign complementing the kid’s game skills. The next sign asks for his name and where he lives. Afterall, it’s just like meeting a kid in a playground, right? Your son types a reply giving his real name and says he’s from Texas but away on a family trip. The interaction continues between the avatar and the kid. More information is exchanged. To the young one, the questions seem harmless, and the interaction is just fun with some “online friend”. Is there a problem here and what might that be?
And now consider the young teen daughter. She’s online in a chat forum with her school friends (think of this as “friends online”). She’s posting comments about the family trip, how her kid brother is a brat, and how she’s just so bored with it all. At one point, your daughter updates her Facebook page with the fact that they’re in some boring restaurant in the middle of nowhere. She wishes she could just be at home, hanging out with her BFF in a big shopping mall in Dallas where she lives. Might there be a problem here and what might that be?
There are a couple of simple concepts illustrated in both cases:
Friends online: This is a term that means you’re in a chat, text, or game session with people that you really know.
Online friends: This term means you’re in a chat, text, Web page, or game with people that you don’t really know outside of the session.
There is a saying first coined by Peter Steiner in 1993 New Yorker cartoon: “On the Internet nobody knows you’re a dog”. This simple phrase holds true now more than ever. It stresses the anonymity and lack of physical contact in an Internet relationship.
For the young boy, he’s playing games with online friends, but he doesn’t really know who they are. The young boy might trust that the other players are just like-minded kids having fun. Avatars have properties including the sign-in-name and information provided by the player. But the sign-in name is not their real name, and their claimed location can be anywhere in the world. As the interaction progressed, the exchange of seemingly harmless information can become very dangerous. Should this online relationship evolve, a groomer might recruit the young one or derive enough information to begin a campaign of either harassment, extortion, or worse sextortion.
Until the teen daughter posted on Facebook, she was interacting with friends online. Even though she knows everyone in the chat session, dangers still exist. She’s sharing information that should be considered personal, including information about relationships, her family, and the trip. In a Pew Research Center report (2022) some 54% of girls experienced cyberbullying, while 44% of boys experienced at least one incident. Although this data is a bit old, the FBI tells us that this problem is growing significantly. The reality is that a significant number of perpetrators are known by the victims, think school colleagues and “friends”. When the daughter posted on Facebook, she interacted with online friends (people that she doesn’t know). That post could be read by anyone. Cybercrime starts with recognizance, or what we refer to as Open-Source Intelligence gathering. The type of information the daughter posts can be combined with other sources and lead to both online bullying by jealous friends, extortion, and even physical problems.
Here are four basic things that should be reinforced frequently with any young person using technology:
Keep personal information private. This includes your real name and location
Be careful what you post. Even simple posts with information can be combined with other information and used against you.
Know your privacy settings and use them!
Always use a strong password (numbers, upper- and lower-case letters, and symbols). Don’t be afraid to change it. And don’t share it with anyone.
For the young son’s iPad use, the password used to log into the game should be controlled by the parent. After use, the parent should log into the game using the same account and check for any activity that might be suspicious. The teen daughter’s situation may be more difficult to detect issues and deal with them. Parents need to stay close to their teens and have constant conversations with them about using the technologies and reporting anything bad that may occur. Reporting cyber incidents to parents MUST be a safe harbor, no matter how angry the parent might be at the kid or how much trouble they may have stumbled into.
I wrote the novel, The Digital Detective: First Intervention, as a fun way for kids to become more educated about cyber safety. The story is about young teenagers who inadvertently fight cyber terrorism. Reviews from parents (see Amazon) have stressed how well the book allowed them to start and have meaningful conversations with their children.
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