How you can protect your children against online damage – Moneysenense

They can contact us, develop trust and apparently asking harmless questions such as: “Oh, you have a dog? What’s your dog?” With the help of artificial intelligence tools, they then use permutations of this information in attempts to hack the online accounts of other family members.

“A child can be an effective channel for a criminal to obtain that information,” warns Julie Kuzmic, Senior Compliance Officer, Consumer Advocacy with Credit Bureau Equifax Canada.

A series of damage

Since parents know all too well, the exposure of children to the internet with a series of benefits, but also lurking dangers. “There are potential damage to children as young as babies and toddlers to older teenagers – such as 18, 19 years old,” says Kuzmic. Over that period they can be exposed to:

• Development damage. Exposure to screens and seeing people and hearing voices online influences the brain growth of the infancy and other activities can be crucial for cognitive development, such as unstructured play and human interaction.
• Harmful content. Promoted content, wrong information, disinformation and modified images can all negatively influence the growth, learning and judgment of the child.
• Snode contact and exploitation. Of special care for parents, the potential for online predators is to contact us and to develop relationships with their children for their own harmful purposes.
• Privacy infringements and data collection. As in the example described above, criminals can obtain personal information to cheat or accept the identity of adult members of their household or the children themselves.
• Mental and emotional disease. Excessive use of social media in particular is linked to fear, depression, body image problems, lack of sleep, low physical activity and lagging social development.

Do not assume that children know what they are doing

Although they often seem to be technology Savvy, who sometimes serve as supportive for their confused parents, “children do not have the life experience to know that not everyone is who they say they are,” says Kuzmic. At other times they can “have a low consciousness of the sustainability of what they do online. Things they post and share can be available and visible for the rest of the time, so there can be an impact on later in their lives.”

They can be particularly vulnerable in their early teenage years if they question their parents’ authority, push boundaries and go online behavior with a higher risk. This coincides with the age in which they have their first bank and social media accounts and mobile phones possible.

“In a way suitable for age, it is important to have a constant conversation with your children about guidelines and expectations,” says Kuzmic. “Consider protection at any age as a layered and evolving situation. It’s not something you talk about once and then it’s fine.”

Measures to protect children against online damage

Protecting your descendants online requires a practical approach. “Allowing exposure to online activities might have to come up with training wheels, where parents are a little more involved in the beginning and learn together with the children,” says Kuzmic. Some steps she recommends include:

• Set up rules for internet access And the age when children have access to social media. Some families write it down as a contract that everyone can see and agrees.
• Impose physical limitationsLike no devices after going to sleep.
• Set up digital restrictions Such as blocking platforms that possibly screen undesirable content or a safe virtual private network (VPN).
• Give priority to online safety. Explain why your children should be on your guard for people who approach them online. Advise them to prevent random links, banner advertisements or quizzes that are designed to lure them in unsafe spaces.
• Discouraging From personal information about social media.

Although bad actors focus on minors for various malignant reasons, they are all zero on the relatively weaknesses of children, such as a desire to be accepted and become friends. Parents must be there, says Kuzmic, to remind their children that what might not seem to them if a dangerous situation “might be a dangerous situation.”

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Digital security against Equifax Complete protection

The most difficult for parents – especially as their children get older and increasingly independent – is that they cannot always be there. Consider Equifax for an extra level of online safety^Tm Protection, a monthly subscription service with parental supervision of Bitdefender to limit which websites and apps your children have access.

Other functions of Equifax Complete protection include:

• Daily credit monitoring and warnings to inform you of important changes to your Equifax credit report, such as a new credit card or loan application.
• Webscan, which monitors the Dark Web (hidden websites where criminals buy and sell data) to see if your personal information appears there.
• Monitoring of social media provided by market leader Zerofox, to warn you about suspicious activities on your social media accounts.
• Online data reproduction by NordVPN and online generating password and storage by Nordpass
• Bitdefender device protection to stop phishing attempts and protect devices against viruses and malware.

Equifax Complete protection costs $ 34.95 per month. For more information, go to the Equifax website.

About Michael McCullough

Michael is a financial writer and editor in Duncan, BC He is a former editor -in -chief of Canadian Business and editorial director of Canada Wide Media. He also writes for the Globe and Mail and BcBusiness.