Is the internet becoming a safer or more dangerous place? This is the main question raised on the occasion of the Safer Internet Day 2020 (SID) that this year will be held Tuesday 11 February. The World Awareness Day for the Risks of Using the Internet, highlights an issue that should be of major concern, especially when it comes to children and their interaction with the online world.
Safer Internet Day occurs every year in February with a very specific purpose. The event promotes the responsible use of online technologies, especially by children and young people. Like any other problem, society will not be able to address it unless there is an awareness that such a problem exists.
Under the motto "Together for a better internet", the campaign focuses on making the Internet a safer place for all users, and especially for children. The latter are more exposed as they have fewer filters than adults who are more aware of their actions and how they expose their life online.
Companies and institutions are working to create safe environments, and some initiatives are more successful than others. In 2019, one measure was particularly more effective than all the others: a recent agreement between Google and the US Federal Trade Commission led the company to make changes to the online service with repercussions worldwide.
“We are changing the way we process data related to children's content on YouTube. In about four months, we will treat the data of anyone who watches children's content on YouTube as if it came from a child, regardless of the user's actual age, ”the company said. Youtube is the best example of positive change with a tangible impact on Internet security. Content creators now ensure that what they produce is actually suitable for children, which changes the way website visitors are tracked on the internet.
If the changes made by Google to Youtube go in the right direction, on the Internet we find a lot of content for children not classified correctly. The advice is to equip yourself with an adequate parental control solution to have a filter on contents that are not suitable for age.
We also need to keep in mind that data breaches happen all the time, and sometimes directly affect personal data such as names, email addresses, credit card information and much more. Ideally, it would be good to know in real time whether the data was pulled through a breach.
For the Internet to become a better and safer place, some security best practices need to be adopted. Most of the time basic security measures are circumvented or simply ignored. The use of strong and unique passwords, which allow two-factor authentication, wherever now available, and the avoidance of excessive sharing of personal and private information, are some examples of best practices for security. Finally, employing a powerful parental control solution is an indispensable measure to keep children safe and away from inappropriate online content.
How companies choose to treat this type of data in the future remains to be decided, but the current impetus is to prevent the use of metadata for marketing purposes. Events like Safer Internet Day 2020 remind everyone that users and companies must take responsibility for privacy.
