social mediaAll our Privacy Parent articles about or related to the potential issues of social media.
All our Privacy Parent articles about or related to the potential issues of social media.
March 13th, 2020
Following are seven simple steps you can take to improve your digital security. Protecting yourself can seem impossibly complicated. It doesn’t have to be. These are steps you can take today to defend your privacy and improve your security. They’re simple and effective. Let’s go.
1) Get off social media. The less you “share,” the more secure you’ll be. Even private accounts aren’t really private: What’s stopping a follower from taking a screen shot…... Continue reading >
November 13th, 2019
Instagram is experimenting with likes—specifically, it’s testing what happens when it switches off public “like” tallies. Other tech companies, Twitter and Facebook among them, are launching similar assessments. According to Axios: “Responding to public clamor and media criticism, social media companies are trying to move away from engagement at all costs and towards a healthier experience. That means they’re also stepping into a more unpredictable future for their own bottom lines and those of businesses…... Continue reading >
October 30th, 2019
There’s almost always a semi-secret way to sneak into a website’s off-limits areas, and very often, your kids know about it before you do. This goes for age-restricted content on YouTube, too.
Elsewhere on this site, we’ve covered the use of VPNs to breach firewalls and masking apps that disguise the programs a smartphone is running. Here’s another deceptive—and surprisingly simple—trick parents ought to know about: adding the letters NSFW to…... Continue reading >
September 25th, 2019
YouTube doesn’t have a popularity problem—just about everyone everywhere uses it. But it has had problems controlling what videos find their way to the site and who sees them. Your kids have the same access to the videos on YouTube you have. Whether those videos are appropriate for children is immaterial, and that is a problem. YouTube Kids is the company’s solution.
Elsagate
YouTube has literally millions of videos coming…... Continue reading >
September 24th, 2019
Facebook has suspended a vast swath of apps from its platform, citing privacy concerns, in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The tech giant has been roundly criticized for its policies relating to the collection and dissemination of personal data and was fined $5 billion by the Federal Trade Commission for mishandling users’ information. Millions of apps developed for Facebook are under review.
... Continue reading >
August 27th, 2019
Money can’t buy you love, but it can buy you friends. Likes, comments, followers and friends are all for sale on the Internet. Want 5,000 “real Instagram likes” on a recent post? That’ll be $28, please. Need to increase your reach on Twitter by adding 10,000 followers? Then the “Premium Package” is for you. It’s $80 and, the vendor vows, “100% safe.”
Why would anyone pay to increase their friends-and-followers tally? What would be…... Continue reading >
July 27th, 2019
Your kids know what TikTok is, and so do roughly 500 million monthly users. You should, too.
TikTok is a social media app used to make and easily share short videos. It’s like Vine, if you recall that early-days video app, but much more popular. It’s fun, engaging, and easy to use, and therein lies the problem: millions of quick, zany videos at your fingertips, waiting to eat up hours of your day and…... Continue reading >
July 24th, 2019
It may seem ridiculous to you, but Instagram Influencer is a real job. And it can be wildly lucrative: a million bucks per post.
Influencers play an increasingly important role in the business and commercial worlds, which means it’s increasingly important for parents to understand what they are.
These are the people who will be in front of your kids on social media in the future, selling…... Continue reading >
April 9th, 2019
And that’s not a good thing.
If your children own or are allowed to use a smartphone, chances are good that they have installed the Snapchat app to communicate with their friends. Indeed, Snapchat is among the top five social media apps used by children, according to a report from ABC. Often, it’s merely a fun diversion. But sometimes, there are risks.
... Continue reading >
March 26th, 2019
When the Internet was newer, people used to joke about the most serious users being able to browse so long that some day they would actually reach the end. It wasn’t actually possible then, and it’s way less possible now. There are more pages, and the scrolling is endless. By design.
The term is Infinite Scroll, which describes a page-design technique and a Javascript tool that allows a site to keep feeding and…... Continue reading >