A warning if your kids go on social media websites

[Arriba]

I googled my daughters name the other day to see if it linked to her dancing competition results and was shocked with what it revealed.
She'd set up an account on askfm and the abuse she was getting was awful. Cowards abuse others as their identities are not revealed on that site. My girl is 13 years old and no angel but the stuff on there was not what a father should be reading.
I made her delete it immediately.

More worryingly is that I found links to another site called badoo, a dating site which had self pictures she'd taken on her phone and had her as aged 30 and looking for dates(she looks about 16-17)I challenged her about it and she was adamant that she knew nothing of this. After looking up this badoo site I found that they get into peoples facebook accounts and set these things up illegally. It's now being investigated by the police and my mrs has contacted the site and demanded they remove the page at their advice. 24 hours later it still hasn't gone yet. We've got a direct number to a guy at CEOP who the police put us onto and if it aint gone soon then we have to chase it up further.

If you have kids around mine's age I suggest you do what I did as this could happen to your child.

[Sippo]

The awful world of social media.

It's scary. Take Facebook for example. Don't you have to be 14 to join? Look how many youngsters are on that.

[Simon Pieman]

You should review the privacy settings on facebook and teach your kids about phishing etc.

[Arriba]

You should review the privacy settings on facebook and teach your kids about phishing etc.

Everything was and is set up as friends only but it still got hacked. Apart from banning her from facebook and removing her account we couldn't have done anymore. Apparantly this site is well know for hacking accounts.

[Barry Scott]

I'd not have thought she was hacked, but scraped/copied for the benefit of a fake profile on Badoo. There are quite a few companies out there who sell dating profiles, many of which are created simply by copying someone's FB profile and it's a piece of piss to do.

The problem is, once you get online and start adding your personal information into the ether, it's there permanently and is easily and regularly copied and used for purposes outside of what you intended. 

[LucienSanchez]

This Badoo site was on a Watchdog-esque program the other week... people using it to make up fake dating profiles using under age Facebook profile pictures unbeknown to the person involved. The fact they still let it happen is disturbing.

Edit: it was what Barry said. Dating sites buy profiles off of companies - profiles taht are obtained in dubious means without permission. Think it was Dawn Porter (yum) who did a doc about it.

[SuggWillSugg MBE]

I'm planning on writing my dissertation on this exact kind of thing in a few weeks.

I'd actually forgotten about Ask.Fm which will really help. So cheers for posting!

[reeves4england]

I'm planning on writing my dissertation on this exact kind of thing in a few weeks.

I'd actually forgotten about Ask.Fm which will really help. So cheers for posting!

Radio 1 Newsbeat did quite a bit on it recently. Probably worth searching for some articles fro mthem - they won't be in-depth but I'm sure they'll provoke thought.

[SuggWillSugg MBE]

Will do, appreciated.

[Chubbs]

More parents need to be aware of what their kids are doing on the internet. Good post this.

[suttonred]

I work in IT in education so well up on this, but you have to be constantly alert. I've been to schools where kids have logged onto sites advertised in leisure centres and even I felt Ill at the stuff. Get any monitoring software you can and check their histories and cached sites. It is a little big brother but saves a lot of pain in the long run, until they are really old enough to know.

[Sippo]

I work in IT in education so well up on this, but you have to be constantly alert. I've been to schools where kids have logged onto sites advertised in leisure centres and even I felt Ill at the stuff. Get any monitoring software you can and check their histories and cached sites. It is a little big brother but saves a lot of pain in the long run, until they are really old enough to know.

Who for?

Same as me. The amount of IT filtering we have to do just to protect the kids. The issue we find are smart phones. Kids aren't allowed them in school, but we can't stop it 100%.

[suttonred]

Yeah the big push for byod is going to be an issue for us. I mainly work in Surrey and South London schools, So get both ends of the spectrum. I work for a company that begins with B and ends in K

[Samdy Gray]

My kids aren't getting internet access until they're 25.

[Sippo]

BYOD is good, we have filtered internet wireless but 3/4G is the biggest issue.

We need to build a dome over the school.

We even had one parent call and complain once about their child accessing Facebook on their phone via their 3G signal.