Adults
There are lots of safety tips for keeping yourself and your family safe online:
Passwords: We all use them, and they are used for most apps. We use online, including our banking details and social media accounts. It’s best to use different passwords for different things and to change them regularly. Make sure your passwords are strong and not easily guessed by others. But make sure you don’t forget them yourself. If you do, there is usually a recovery process, so it’s always better to be safe than sorry.
Updates: Make sure you keep everything regularly updated. Updates can be time-consuming and a pain, but the main reason is to make sure that all your information is safe and secure, so don’t ignore them.
Turn on 2-step verification. This means that to sign in, you will have to use a code sent to your e-mail or your phone to complete the sign in. Someone trying to hack your account will have to know both your account details and your phone or email details. It’s an extra step of safety.
Secure your internet with an extra safety service, and read more about Surfshark VPN here.
Children
Setting up parental controls on your children’s devices is a must. There are many ways to do this, and most are relevant to each different device. You can find details on each device or follow an online guide
Talk to your children about the dangers of the internet. Make sure they understand about fake news, cyberbullying, and being introduced to material that may influence them in ways you don’t wish for them, like self-harming or dangerous stunts. Keep talking and make sure your child understand that they can come to you whenever they feel they need to.
Find out what apps. Your child is using and make sure they are age appropriate. Make sure they understand about paying for services and that they ask before using any of their own money, or make sure they don’t have access to your money.
There are lots of tips and websites online for helping you to keep your children safe, and you can find these easily. Watch safety tips with your child.
Sites like Internet Matters are really full of information for you and your child.
Finally, keep a check on how long your child is spending online with their apps. And make sure they have regular breaks and do something different. Fresh air is important too.
unsplash – christinhumephoto
We were just talking about this at dinner last night! Another mom and I were talking about keeping kids safe online and were talking about a lot of these points (with our older teens and young adults).
These are all great internet safety tips! Thank you for sharing.
#mmbc
These are good tips, thank you. There are so many things that we never really learned about using the Internet and it would be a shame to learn the hard way.
so true, we didn’t even have internet at home until my eldest two were teenagers. I was careful with my younger ones though. We only had one computer and it was in full view of everyone. These days they all have their own computers, phones and tablets! Technology has left me behind.
We have a strict no phones at the dinner / breakfast table policy and no phones in the bedroom at night. Starting that from day one meant that there were no previous habits to break and it’s worked really well for us.
#MMBC
I wish I’d started that early on. Unfortunately, with two of mine being adults and two older teens they do as they please, only the youngest has rules. I have always had parental controls when they were younger though, and we talk constantly about what they are watching and if they’ve seen anything disturbing. I’ve been lucky so far, although my teen got addicted to a podcast and told me about it, so I listened and it was a bit scary for me, it wasn’t over the top though, I’m just a bit sensitive! My adult daughter used to to do the zombie walk, which was an exercise ‘listen’ which featured being chased by zombies, every so often you had to run to escape, or slow down to avoid detection. You wouldn’t get me doing that either.