How to keep kids safe online
Holidays mean more free time to go online, so what can parents do?
The summer holidays are stretching ahead — and parents will have a tough job keeping bored youngsters off their devices.
And at a time when online use will undoubtedly rise, parents are worried about the content their kids can access.
A new survey has found threequarters of Kiwi parents are concerned their kids may have access to online porn, but only one in three use online tools to block these sites.
Of the 653 New Zealand parents surveyed by Perceptive Research, less than a third said they had installed programmes to block adult content.
Most said they hadn’t used online protection software because they were unaware of such tools or did not know how to use them.
NetSafe director Martin Cocker said because technology was rapidly changing, today’s youth were navigating challenges their parents never had to.
“Parents can help their child have a positive online experience by using the right tools, having open conversations about how their child should use technology, role modelling appropriate behaviours, and letting them know where to go for help if they need it.”
Slingshot general manager and father-of-four Taryn Hamilton said the internet provider understood the struggles parents faced and launched the Family Filter tool to help customers “protect your kids from the darker corners of the web”.
“We know kids are out and about during summer but when they are at home and online, there tends to be less supervision. As parents we can’t bubble wrap our kids, but we do want to keep them safe.”
Family Filter “blocks porn and other potentially harmful sites at a network-level, protecting any device that’s connected to the home Wi-Fi”, Hamilton said.
It also stops web users from accessing sites infected with viruses, the dark web, dating sites and web pages containing content about drugs, gambling, alcohol, tobacco, suicide and self harm. The filter is free for the first year and can be turned on and off from Slingshot customers’ accounts.