Child Cybersecurity is a Growing Concern With the Regular Use of Digital Gaming Platforms

We are here with a very special Tom's tech tips. This is the child's safety edition. And today, I'm joined by Sam. Say hello, Sam. Hi, everyone. So Sam is a cyber security expert. For a child. She's my daughter, and she's been listening to all of the tech the tech tips since she's been born, and she's active on the computer and social media. So she has some tips today. The first tip that we're gonna talk about is staying safe while using video games with chat. So Roblox, Fortnite, almost any box multiplayer game, Minecraft, almost all of these games have a social aspect and a chat feature. And as a parent, first and foremost, you wanna look at that chat feature and see what restrictions are appropriate based on the age of your child. I personally like to lock down all chat. If I don't lock down all chat. I limit the users to known users and friends, but there's still risk associated Sam, what are some tips? Sometimes that one thing you should definitely never do is give someone that you have no idea who they are or who you think they are. Just don't give any information about yourself. So your name, your address, where you live, your age, any of that important information about you, you shouldn't share that online. So what if someone asks you your password? You don't share your password at all because it's not safe. And if you have information on your account that you want to keep private, like, of course, for games to ask you your date of birth, your name, and other information. People, if they get into your account, they could find out all that information and find out a way to use it against you. So, Sam, what if someone asks you send them a picture. You shouldn't ever send pictures of yourself or other people because they are o can always be little clues or little hints that show where you are or where you have been or who you are. So never send pictures. Yeah. So one of the things that's really important to educate your children on is as a lot of the population that sees Tom's tech to knows about open source intelligence gathering or active intelligence gathering, where you use social media Internet to identify folks that are committing crimes. Well, child predators can do the same exact thing. So think about it this way. If your child plays a sport and posts a picture of their sport, generally there's gonna be a team name a town associated with and a last name on that shirt. With that picture, you can identify almost certainly where someone lives, their last name, which would generally be able to pretty quickly find an address and where they go to school and think about a a bad actor with that information. So example would be if you shared that information, that bad actor could use social engineering to trick trick a child into things that there's someone else. Sam, what if someone that you know let's say that your that your parental, your parents let you chat with just your friends What if your friends ask you for information, like your address or personal information or pictures? What do you what do you tell them? Not always, is it a guarantee that it's your friends? I mean, of course, most of the time, it will be your friends, but you can't always trust that it always is. So you can't share that information because one other people in most chat services can get the of the information. It's not private. You can do a private, but still there's ways that people could see that. So if you want to, tell them to text either your parents or guardian and have them talk about it on there. So you know you're safe. Awesome. Thank you, Sam. Thank you for coming on. We're gonna do a couple more in a mini series. On Tom's tech tips and child safety.