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The seventh student seems desperate to approach. She just attended a conference on cybersecurity at her school, where she raised her hand when asked if she had a social media account – Snapchat, in her case.
Most of Nathan Hale's elementary school students in Chicago, many of whom were younger than the required age of 13, did the same when Rich Wistocki, retired police inspector, informed him from Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat or other apps.
"Please, please, please, do not use my photo or a video of me raising my hand", this particular child begs several times, despite the assurances that she was not caught by the camera.
"Do not use mine either," a friend intervenes quickly, as they recover and actively begin to scroll through mobile phones, which all Nathan Hale's students are required to give to their teachers during the school day .
They argue because their parents do not know that they are on social media, the gateway to the secret digital lives of many teenagers today – and that for a many, they could also include:
– Use video and chat features to meet strangers on apps ranging from Musical.ly to WhatsApp and Houseparty;
– Store risky photos in safe applications that look like something as innocent as a calculator – and then swap those photos as baseball cards;
– Use Text Burner and other applications to harass and intimidate peers with anonymous messages;
– Use applications that secretly save messages on Snapchat and other apps before they disappear;
– Order pot and other drugs via a number of social media and communication apps or encrypted websites – or buy something online that you do not want that they use prepaid credit cards (makeup maybe?);
– Buy or borrow "burner" phones to avoid parental supervision or when phone privileges are lost.
– And give their loved ones or friends the password for social media accounts so that they can "manage" their accounts when their phones are removed.
How are they going to get out in 2018? In a world where the words "cyberbullying" and "predator" have been etched into the collective parental psyche for a while? Well, on the one hand, the devices have become smaller and the children who receive them – phones, tablets and iPods – are getting younger and, therefore, more savvy sooner. The number of apps and games has also exploded and these offerings are continually changing.
According to Wistocki, a cybersecurity consultant whose busy schedule requires him to meet with his parents and youth since he retired from the Naperville Police Department, in Illinois, many parents are just too confident.
During these interviews, he holds a mobile phone and regularly tells parents with big eyes:
"When you give this child, at the age of 11, this worrying device, it's like giving them the keys to their brand new Mercedes and telling them," Honey, you can go to Vegas. . York, wherever you want to go .. "And with wi-fi, the device does not just mean a phone, but also tablets and iPods.
Wistocki was invited to speak earlier this month at Nathan Hale Elementary School by the director, Dawn Iles-Gomez, whose days are increasingly filled with drama that begins on social media.
And this is often not the usual suspects in her office, but rather a long and diverse parade of students that she sees acting in a way in person and very differently in the digital world .
"It's shocking – the language and the threats and the nasty things that are said," she says. "And I would say, 75% of the time, I'm calling a parent and their parent will say," Well, no, they said they did not do it. & # 39; 39;
"And I'm like," Well, they did it. "
To get parents to meet with Wistocki, she offered them extra passes and other incentives. Approximately 70 went to a school with 930 students.
Kathleen Kazupski, a mother of two girls, aged 13 and 17, was one of them – and she was bending over every word of Wistocki.
"As parents, we must wake up, no doubt," she said after the conference. She came, in part, because she discovered last year that her youngest daughter was talking to a boy she did not know, until mom would put an end to it. . "I scared him."
Jennea Bivens, another parent who participated, uses an app called MMGuardian to manage and monitor the phone usage of her 13-year-old daughter. She turns it off during the school day, although her daughter can call her, and at bedtime. She turns off some applications, sometimes in punishment, and monitors the texts. To monitor most social media, she must either be on her daughter's phone, or check accounts she knows she has on her own social media, most recently after her daughter for throwing a punch. look at some of his video posts. "It's a full-time job," concedes Bivens.
"People make fun of me because I'm watching his stuff, but I do not have the same problems as others."
A 2016 Pew Research Center survey revealed that at the time, about half of parents reported having already viewed their children's phone calls and text messages – or even loved their children on social media (if they knew what social media was using their children) But they were less likely to use technological tools to monitor, block or track their teens.
Since then, built-in parenting restrictions, including on-screen time limits and application blocking, have been permanently added to Google's Android via its family link. In addition to allowing parents' approval for applications and music purchases, the next Apple operating system, iOS 12, will allow parents to have more control over the ############################################################################## Screen, application use and navigation on iPhones, iPads and iPods.
Beyond this, independent surveillance applications have also proliferated, sometimes allowing parents to have even more control to view and manage certain content from their own devices, often for a monthly fee. But, as Wistocki notes, only a few of these apps allow parents to see messages and messages on social networks, such as Snapchat and Instagram. In his own conversations with parents, he recommends monitoring WebWatcher and My Mobile Watchdog applications, which he believes can dig deeper into the more open Android system, in some cases even informing a parent when certain words are being used or provocative images. exchange.
Until his own sons were 18, Wistocki monitored their sites and posts on different social media, controlled phone usage and approved what apps they could download. He tells parents that they should do the same thing.
"There is no privacy for children," is one of his most commonly used mantras, which he uses to push reluctant parents.
Other technology experts agree that monitoring makes sense for young children. But Pam Wisniewski, an assistant professor in the computer department of the University of Central Florida, is among those who suggest a gradual loosening of the strings as teens prove that they can be trusted. She says that she and her students are working on another type of monitoring app for parents called Circle of Trust which is based on this concept.
"I'm almost at the point where I think the world would be better without social media," says Wisniewski, who studies the interaction between the human computer and online teen safety. "But I'm also a pragmatist. So how do you get the most out of it?"
Rather than cutting a child out of social media, she encourages parents to look for opportunities for learning. When inappropriate content goes through their feed, for example, she suggests discussing coping strategies, such as hiding the person's content or blocking them, if necessary.
Sarita Schoenebeck, assistant professor and director of the Living Online Lab at the University of Michigan, says her research has also revealed that closing teenagers to social media only makes them more devious.
It also warns parents against a bad application, simply because some people use it inappropriately – for example, to share sexting photos or videos, nude or semi-nude images that have become very popular in romantic relationships.
"Focus on the behavior, not the application", advises Schoenebeck.
Some additional tips for parents:
– While he advocates vigilant oversight, Wistocki also tells parents to offer their children the "Golden Ticket" – no punishment when they come to talk to them about the mistakes they made online. or the help they need with a social media problem. Do not remove the devices, he says, but keep the limits firm. And always make sure that they remove naked content, which is considered to be child pornography in many states.
– David Coffey, Digital Director at IDShield, a company that helps his clients fight off identity theft, tells his two teenagers, "Do not put anything on your phone that you would not want to see and read to Grandma. Judy.
– Many technology experts are asking parents to stay firm and not allow kids to charge their devices in their room during the night, eliminating the temptation to send text messages and access networks. social. Nathan Hale's director, Iles-Gomez, says his stepchildren first protested and said they needed the phone to wake them up in the morning. She replied with, "They sell clocks."
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Surveillance is not foolproof either. Recently, Bivens' daughter, Ayrial Miller, went "live" on Twitter and stumbled upon a stranger who asked her to show her bare feet – a strange request that led her to end the connection quickly. .
"It's so hard to see and catch everything," concedes Bivens, the mother who watches her daughter's phone so closely.
In this case, Ayrial used a tablet. But the good news was that she quickly told her mother what had happened.
In recent days they have spent time through his social media contacts, as Wistocki has suggested. If her daughter does not know the person's name, how she knows them and where they live, the contact is deleted.
"It's annoying," says Ayrial, sometimes grumpy about her mother's supervision. "But then I see that she cares about me."
Finally, she hopes that Mom will "back off" a little.
"When I'm in high school, it can be embarrassing sometimes, you know?" she says. "You must learn your own – how can I put that? – discipline .. You must learn from your own mistakes."
If she does not do it, she says that she always comes up with new stuff to get online secretly. And no, she will not share how.
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Online:
Talk TEDx from Wistocki: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2buaziaNnE
Living Online Lab from the University of Michigan: http://yardi.people.si.umich.edu/lol/
Google Family Link: https://families.google.com/familylink/
The Apple Family Page: https://www.apple.com/families/
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