Cyber safety is NOT about Facebook only

Nowadays, much of the cyber safety education more focuses on the more mainstream social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, and these platforms still very popular among the adults and teens. Although many of the bullying, embarrassing posts, stalking, privacy issues are happened on these social networks but mobile apps on smart phones and mobile devices like the iPod and tablets like iPad and Android Tablets are also catching up with these more popular network’s bad reputation for cyber safety issues and privacy.

For my view of point, I think that parents should not just only focusing on Facebook and other mainstream social media software that they can see the post that posted by their children, and ignoring many of the popular mobile apps that kids can install for free on their mobile devices, and will not be discover by their parents as mobile devices apps allow children to download whatever they want without any permission from their parents. In this case, parents will not know what mobile apps already being downloaded by their children.

There are a lot of mobile devices apps that is free of charge, which are like Kik, Tumblr, Instagram, Keek, Snapchat, Wechat and Vine are being used by the children nowadays; which these kind of apps allow them to upload photo, share moments and even can exchange photo to each other. Other than these apps, there are also have a lot of dating or flirting apps are now used by the kids, like Scout, Meow Chat and Zoosk that are basically “meet a perfect stranger” style apps being developed every day. In this case, this could make the children explore in the cyber danger already and they will didn’t notice about it.

In order to let the children has the aware of the cyber safety, I think that parents should control their children from downloading any mobile free apps that their kids should not download and use it in their age because children may have already been approached by a stranger through these apps and may have been exchanging photo already, if you didn’t control it. Other than that, parents should always give some advice when their children are addicting in those mobile apps by giving some reality example to teach them how to prevent this issue happen on themselves. 

I think that, parents should be the light to guide their children out of the darkness.

Don’t ignore mobile app, there are a lot of unseen harms hidden inside it.

Written By:

Lee Zi Ling

Bachelor of Public Relations (Honours)
Tunku Abdul Rahman University College