Online Safety & Teens

While reading information on internet safety I realized that a lot of the things I do and put online are even more unsafe than I originally thought. I learned that most internet safety issues are either caused by carelessness or the unknown. When I say carelessness I am referring to the people who post personal information on their pages or profiles when they know how dangerous it can be, yet they proceed to do it anyways. The unknown, on the other hand, that I stated is considered the things about the internet we do not know. Most of us just post information by filling in the blanks that the profile provides we know there are some dangers involved but we are not aware of how many things float about in cyber space. Hopefully, somebody can read this and become more aware of the hidden dangers of the internet.

My research led me to a lot of information on cyber-bullying. Cyber-bullying is when people post mean things about you or harass you online by continuous commenting, messaging, IMing, etc. to make you feel bad about yourself or to just get on your nerves. It usually starts out as playfully teasing a person and gradually gets worse and could possibly lead to embarrassing pictures or videos leaking into cyber space for everybody to see. This is not only wrong but in some cases can be illegal. Luckily, there are at least some teens, like myself and most of my friends for example, who do not get involved in a cyber-bullying environment. A poll was conducted about what you would do if you received an e-mail that somebody sent to bully another person, forty percent of teens said they would delete the e-mail and tell the person what they are doing is wrong and forty-four percent of teens would just delete it. Only six percent of the teens polled said they would send out the e-mail, to me these are shocking results. They are shocking because you would think most teens would forward it and laugh about it with their friends, however I am happy to see that my theory was incorrect.

The next thing I learned the most about involved sites, for example MySpace and Facebook. I discovered that these sites are not always as safe as they should be. A poll was also conducted on how safe you think these sites are and a shocking fifty-nine percent said that they felt the sites were unsafe, forty percent feel that they are somewhat unsafe and the other nineteen percent feel the sites are very unsafe. These statistics opened my eyes a little to the safety of my profile and personal information, I always knew putting anything online for that matter was unsafe and not the best of ideas but reading these results is making me think even more about it. I think the results that shocked me the most were the results of the poll given to the fifty-nine percent who felt the sites were somewhat or very unsafe. They asked them about their online habits and most of them uploaded information, pictures, and/or videos of themselves to their pages even though they felt it was unsafe. That is a startling discovery, to know that people would post things even when they did not feel safe doing so is quite scary business.

I am glad we had to do research on this topic because it really showed me what I was overlooking when it came to my safety online. I post things all the time but I do not really feel unsafe considering I use the private settings on many parts of my profile. However, reading over this information and thinking more about it, even though I use privacy settings, I am going to start being more careful as to what I post online, and I think everybody should read over this research as well, you never know, it might save you from many scenarios, whether they be small or life threatening.