Online harassment prevention

The most important advice for parents is to have open and ongoing conversations about safe and appropriate behavior online.

Other tips to consider:

1.- Find out about the websites, software, games and applications your children use.

2.- Check your gaming and social media posts and profiles. Have conversations about what is appropriate to say or share.

3.- Explain to your children that once images or comments are posted online, they can be shared with anyone and never completely disappear.

4.- Make sure your children use privacy settings to restrict access to their online profiles.

5.- Tell your children to be very careful when communicating online with someone they don't know in real life.

6.- Encourage children to choose appropriate usernames and create strong passwords.

7.- Make it a rule with your children that they cannot make a date with someone they met online without your knowledge and supervision.

8.- Know how to disable location services on your child's smart device.

9. Consider password-protected settings for installing age-appropriate apps on smart devices.

10.- Consider installing filtering and/or blocking software on computers.

11.- Monitor your child's phone plans and unusual activity credit.

12.- Consider appropriate phone and data plans for your child.

13.- Consider syncing smart devices with the family account.

14.- It is important that if your child ever feels uncomfortable while online, immediately close the program, advise him or her to tell it without fear or to a trusted friend.

15.- iImmediately report any inappropriate contact between an adult and your child to the authorities in your country. Also notify the site they were using.

Other recommendations

The following is recommended when sharing content (for example, photos and videos) or interacting with people online:

1.- Monitor children's online activity and discuss the risks associated with sharing personal content.

2.- Be discreet when posting images, videos and personal content online, particularly those that include children or their information.

3.- Images, videos or personal information posted online can be captured, manipulated and distributed by malicious actors without your knowledge or consent.

4.- Once content is shared on the Internet, it can be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to remove it once it is distributed or published by other parties.

5.- Conduct frequent online searches for you and your children's information (e.g., full name, address, telephone number, etc.) to help identify the exposure and dissemination of personal information on the Internet.

6.- Apply privacy settings on social media accounts, including setting profiles and friend lists to private, to limit public exposure of your photos, videos and other personal information.

7.- Consider using reverse image search engines to locate photos or videos that have circulated on the Internet without your knowledge.

8.- Be careful when accepting friend requests, communicating, participating in video conversations or sending images to people you do not know personally. Be especially careful with people who immediately ask or pressure you to provide them. Those items could be screen captured, recorded, manipulated, shared without your knowledge or consent, and used to exploit you or someone you know.

9.- Do not provide money or other valuable items to unknown or unknown people. Complying with malicious actors does not guarantee that your photos or sensitive content will not be shared.

10.- Be discreet when interacting with people you know online who seem to act outside of your normal pattern of behavior. Hacked social media accounts can be easily manipulated by malicious actors to gain the trust of friends or contacts to promote criminal activities or schemes.

11.- Protect social networks and other online accounts using complex passwords or passphrases and multi-factor authentication.

12.- Investigate the privacy, data sharing and data retention policies of social media platforms, applications and websites before uploading and sharing images, videos or other personal content.

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