The digital age has brought with it a host of concerns for parents regarding the privacy of their children in light of the information and activities that is now being shared online. And with good reason:
“An Associated Press-MTV poll finds 3 in 10 teens and young adults have had people get into their Facebook, Twitter, MySpace or other Internet accounts and either impersonate or spy on them. That’s nearly double the level seen in 2009,” the Washington Post reports.
Teens report that 72% of these incidents are for “spying”, while 65% are for “hacking”, and that often these instances are not driven by malicious intent: “It’s meant to be funny,” said Lindenfelzer, a junior at Ithaca College in New York.
The new digital generation is, in other words, coming of age with the access to social networks and online presence with all the wisdom and experience of teenagers. Until the boundaries are tested and learned, it is adolescent nature to treat the parameters of online privacy with the carelessness of youth–some of the subjects interviewed for the story report both breaching another’s online account in addition to having been hacked.
It’s a life lesson to have one’s privacy be violated- only then could one know the true value of encryption and security. Children and teenagers are often unfortunately ill-equipped to regulate and manage their own privacy and couldn’t possibly be trusted to do so all the time- this is why parental controls are invented in media sources and TV channels.
Providing your child with the bullet proof protection of military-grade encryption is one way to not only keep them safe from the outer world of malicious hackers, but also from other teens and young adults. At the very least it removes them from being a sitting duck target for exploitation.