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Internet Safety |
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Chat and Instant Messaging On February 4, 1999, Cary police arrested a North Carolina man for statutory sex offenses committed against a fourteen-year-old Cary girl whom he had met in a chat session on a Web site. The man had lured the girl into meeting him despite the fact that she was almost half his age. While stories such as these will always scare and disgust parents, no one today should be shocked to learn that incidents like this do occur and are becoming more common. And while these sort of events are rare and extreme, chat and messaging technologies present a number of troubling problems for parents concerned with Internet safety. Chat Chat has been around on the Internet since the late 1980s. Until recently, most Internet chat was done using a command line interface. Folks would connect to a channel on a server running the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) protocol. These systems enabled folks from anywhere on the Internet to interact with each other. Channels often center around hobbies, technologies, entertainment, or sex. As the popularity of the Internet increased, folks began using graphical client interfaces for chatting. These interfaces are easy-to-use and often allow folks to select avatars or characters who are their representatives in the chat room. In the past two to three years, the most popular chat interface has become web-based. Thus, many web sites now attract traffic by offering chat rooms on virtually any topic. Some chat rooms are moderated, in which case an administrator controls what may be posted. Most chat rooms, however, are free-form and can be quite chaotic. Examples of web-based chat rooms include Yahoo! Chat, Lycos Chat, and literally thousands of others. Many of the more prominent chat sites offer chats with celebrities or experts who answer questions (in a moderated format). Children and teens are naturally drawn to chat rooms because of the sense of adventure in interacting with others from around the world. The old saying is that "On the Internet, no one knows you are a dog" and this is certainly taken advantage of in chat rooms. Instant messaging We use the term "instant messaging" to refer to any client that allows direct back-and-forth communication between two parties on the Internet. Unlike chat rooms, anyone who downloads and installs the client software can immediately begin corresponding with others who are also using the software -- the two parties don't have to enter a chat room and there is never any moderator. The most popular of these clients is the AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) but there is also MSN Messenger, ICQ, and the Yahoo! Pager. The instant messaging products may be inherently safer than chat since you must generally send a message specifically to someone whose screen name or user name you've obtained. Of course, if the user wants to limit access to his or her user name, he or she must be careful about what information is made available. For instance, the AIM enables you to put as much or as little information about yourself in your user profile as you want. If you put your street address, then someone can find your user name from a list that results from a search carried out on the address field. Safety concerns with chat and instant messaging The concerns of parents with these technologies are mostly self-evident and are broken down into three categories Addicting nature While less serious than some other problems, some children and teens find the use of chat rooms and instant messaging software to be somewhat addicting. This can be particularly problematic if the child doesn't have much social interaction outside of the computer environment. The psychological implications of this are beyond the scope of this web page but it is clear that there may be other areas of life that are neglected when the child spend too much time online. Revealing personal information Young people can easily be tricked into volunteering or giving out information about themselves that may go beyond the bounds of safety. For example, the child may mention that he is bored because his parents have left him and his siblings alone for the day. Depending on how much care the child has taken to hide his identity, he may have left himself open for a predator to come calling. More likely perhaps is a scenario where a child or teen develops a relationship with someone on the Internet. As this relationship grows, the child may let down some of the natural defenses he or she would normally against strangers. Such is the case with the girl victimized in the introduction to this topic above. One possible solution: Products such as CyberPatrol, which has a feature called ChatGuard. ChatGuard scrambles any personal data (predefined) that your child may submit to a chat room.Bad people pretend to be someone they’re not Let's say that I have become a regular participant in a chat room devoted to a topic I like such as investing in the stock market. I have received advice, given advice, and almost feel like part of a community. Now let's say someone logs in to this chat room as me (maybe this person stole my password or maybe the room wasn't password-protected) and proceeds to subtly give out advice and opinions that would never have been written by me. I now have major damage control to do if I want to restore my reputation with the online community. Perhaps even more seriously, people may represent themselves as someone they are not in corresponding with children. Daniel Okrent, writing in the May 10, 1999 issue of Time magazine, related an incident in his home:
Precautions for children and teens using chat and IM
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