Saturday, March 17, 2007

Blog #5 Cybersafety

One thread that has run through this blog since its inception is the issue of safety, particularly as it relates to children in libraries.

Probably, you have all heard about the “Teen Angels,” kids that help police popular teen sites and report on questionable online behavior and worse. Well, I recently came across the “mother” website, which is called wiredsafety.org/

Here’s a bit of what it’s about:

WiredSafety.org’s work falls into four major areas:
• Assistance for online victims of cybercrime and harassment
• Advice, Training and Help for law enforcement worldwide on preventing, spotting and investigating cybercrimes
• Education for children, parents, communities, law enforcement, and educators
• Information and Awareness on all aspects of online safety, privacy, responsible use and security

Those who can benefit from WiredSaftey.org’s expertise include:
• Parents, grandparents and caregivers;
• Kids, preteens, teens and college students;
• Members of the Internet and interactive technology industries;
• Law enforcement, legislators, the judicial community and regulatory agencies; and
• Schools and other educational institutions


This site is really a group of linked sites with different URLs. The kids’ site is called wired kids.org. and there is a list of all the related sites on the homepage. If you follow the link to wiredkids.org, you will find a great deal of information, and not only for kids. Click on the “Educator” tab and choose “Librarians” and you will get information on filtering and blocking as well as a safe site database.

This person behind all this is Parry Aftab, a mother of two and a security, privacy, and cyberspace lawyer who now donates about 90% of her time to issues of Internet safety. A free speech advocate, Parry is devoted to educating and empowering parents, not the censors.
It’s an interesting and important website with a LOT of information.

Now for the caveats.

Much of the information on the kids site is in all capital letters! For a site that tries to teach Netiquette, I’m both surprised and confused by this.

The navigation on wiredsafety.org is not bad, really, but a child would definitely need help, at least at first. Of course, children have to be registered to use the site, and that requires parental permission as well as verification from the child’s school (so no one can masquerade as a child).

Take a look at this site and tell me what you think.

2 comments:

Parry Aftab said...

Thanks for the mention. You should know that we are redoing the wiredkids page entirely. As a group of all unpaid volunteers, getting the site redone completely is a challenge. :-)

Hopefully, we'll have it redone by back to school.

and we also welcome any help your readers want to provide.

thanks again for a great blog, with lots of great info and for referring your readers to our sites.

You may want to visit stopcyberbullying.org as well.

be safe.
Parry Aftab
Executive Director
WiredSafety.org

Coach B said...

It is good to see that some people realize that safety on the web requires common sense and good parenting rather than indiscriminate censorship.