Kids spend long hours in online activities whether they are studying, doing research for their projects, playing online games, checking out social networking websites or checking e-mails. As a parent, you need to be aware of threats of cyber bullying and threats of theft of information of your kids. You need to discuss all the risks lurking in the cyber space that your kids may encounter while surfing Internet. In order to deal with your kids and with the risks of theft of personal information, COPPA offers better controls to parents. COPPA or Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act provides better parental control over websites kids are using, any other sites that draw personal information from kids under 13 are have to conform to the COPPA. With COPPA, these websites seek parental approval to gather kids’ information, share kids’ data, and also require parents’ permission to post personal information such as full name, address, mobile number, e-mail ids etc.
Apart from relying on the safety measures of COPPA, parents need to take additional initiatives to monitor over their kids’ online activities and to protect kids’ information. Following are the best practices to ensure kids’ privacy and safety online.
Websites your kids are browsing
You must watch over the websites your kids are mostly using especially those that asks for registering with the site. You should scrutinize upon what kind of information it requires while for registration. Hence, talk to your kids about what type of information is safe to disclose and post online along with the risks of divulging personal information on websites and public forums. You also need to see if the is compliant with the COPPA requisitions, if the site has posted its privacy policies and seeks parental permission and participation in kids’ registration.
Be selective
Parents need to be cautious and selective while granting permissions. Many websites seek parental permission through e-mails or postal mails while some websites simply require parents to click on ‘okay’ type of buttons to grant permissions. Apart from when is the right time to grant permission, you need to consider posting of how much information is safe for your kids on the basis of the websites. Many websites pass information to marketers or to harmful developers. Hence, even when you are giving content to some websites about posting kids’ information, ask them not to pass information to third parties.
Read the privacy policy of the website and if the policy states what kind of information the site decide and if you feel it is safe, then move ahead or else ask questions to site owners or the site manager.
