Do you know where your children are?

We had a new blog sign-up with TheGoodBlogs recently called Family Webwatch. It's dedicated to highlighting the dangers of the web. I think it's an admirable effort by Ken Cooper, the blog author. Working daily with Internet technology, I know how easy it is to turn all this exciting technology into malicious and harmful tools. Having firewalls, anti-virus and parental controls doesn't exonerate parents from understanding the threats that are real and out there. It is so easy to hide behind a pseudonym and an image and often the ability to do so brings the worst out of people.

I was a little perturbed this weekend when I found my daughter and her friends playing a word scramble game on the computer. The game itself was harmless but what was alarming was that they were playing the game on instant messenger, a bot on the other side was communicating with them asking them to descramble words. To her credit, she knew it was a bot, however, it did make me stop and wonder what if the bot was just a ploy to engage players only to be replaced by a human, slowly and surreptitiously asking you your name, then asking to descramble your street, etc. You get the picture. We are lulled into a false sense of security because our children are behind four walls but just as we are as reluctant to let them walk by themselves in the big cities, we should exercise the same caution with the Internet. The key is not to hide the dangers from our children but rather to educate them so they themselves can make a distinction between good and evil.