Social Network Services
The goal of social network services is to build online communities of Internet users who share interests, hobbies, or causes. For example, some sites provide dating services, other services enable business networking and so on.
Kids and teenagers usually use social network services in order to keep in touch with their friends and make new friends. They often prefer to use social network services that their main goal is socializing, like Facebook and Myspace. Usually social network services come with a lot of built-in social software tools as emails, instant messaging, blogs and chatrooms.
In these sites, they can register and edit their profile, that is presented by a webpage, showing all of the material they have entered. They can manage a friends' list and search for friends by name or email. They can add photos and different videos to their profile for everybody to see. They use the social network service to manage many aspects of their social life.
Risks:
- In Social network services private information can be exposed. In most social networks you can decide what level of security you want on your profile/webpage. You can make it public and your profile will be available for everyone to see, or you can decide to make it private revealing information only to friends. Some social network services allow you to decide which data you want to make public and which to keep private. It is important that children and teenagers that have a user in social network services do not allow private information to be public. It is important to show them how to use the security setting.
- Child predators use social networks services to target victims by posing as children. They create a child persona by uploading fake pictures to their profile in order to make it more convincing. It is important that your children do not approve as friends people they don't know.
- Your children shouldn't give out their social network service password to anyone. It may fall in the wrong hands and the child's private information, social life, habits and photos will be exposed.
- The ability to upload personal pictures to social network services creates a big risk for children. It exposes their age making them a target for predators. It is important to make sure that teenagers do not upload personal photos that can be interpreted in sexual context and, of course, it is always important to make all personal photos private.