Mrs. Huff’s English Classes

Welcome, new visitors.  Please make sure your comments are on-message.  If you would choose to make a relevant comment that addresses a question to the writer, offers additional advice, or even politely disagrees (in the fashion of good, clean debate), then I welcome your comments and would love to engage in dialog.  If, however, your comment adds nothing to discussion, does not follow rules of common courtesy and netiquette (ask your teacher), or is in any other way insulting or irrelevant, it will not appear, so please refrain from wasting your time, my time, and my students’ time by posting such comments.  Thank you.

You have probably heard a lot about how to stay safe online, but I have found that in many cases students are not told the most important information they need to know about online safety.  For some of you, perhaps this post will cover well-worn ground, but it is my hope that if you don’t know some of this information, you will learn something and possibly (if you need to) change some of your bad online habits.

The number one issue you’ve probably heard about in the media and possibly from your teachers and parents is online predators.  Truthfully speaking, online predators are not the biggest threat to you.  Why?  Because almost every instance in which a young person has been harmed by an online predator resulted from the fact that the young person left home on his/her own to meet someone he/she didn’t know.  You can make the choice not to do meet people you interact with online.  In addition, you can also choose which sites you use.  For instance, you might seriously consider the wisdom of using chat sites to talk to strangers. This is just my opinion, but I think that you should probably only chat with people you know.  By chatting, I refer to online instant messaging systems, IRC, iChat, and other chat systems and clients.  However, also be careful about online forums, newsgroups, blogs, and other interactive sites.  A case in point: I once ventured into a Harry Potter chat room hosted by a Harry Potter fan site called The Leaky Cauldron, and it was only a few minutes before a creepy person started bothering me.  I just left.  You have that choice, too.  Online predators cannot bother you if you walk away, and they cannot harm you if you do not agree to meet them.

In addition to online predators, another safety concern is privacy.  Privacy is yet another issue that is fairly easy for you to resolve.  First, don’t share information like your phone number or address online.  I would advise you to be careful about giving out your full name.  In fact, it’s not a bad idea to come up with a pseudonym.  In all honesty, I see too many students posting their cell phone numbers on Facebook.  Just because someone has to become your friend to view your profile doesn’t mean that the information can’t be obtained by others you don’t want to have it.

Speaking of Facebook, one of my biggest concerns about how students use the Web is that they post things that they probably shouldn’t.  Remember, colleges, teachers, parents, future employers, and even prospective boyfriends/girlfriends all Google people.  What would they find if they Googled you?  Do you think about your online reputation?  Have you posted pictures of yourself that are inappropriate?  People have lost jobs over that sort of thing.  Have you participated in online bullying or even mild meanness?  That information can be found long after the harm done is forgotten by most of the parties involved.  Did you ever get into an online argument?  This is a good picture explaining why Internet arguments happen:

The Internet’s relative anonymity and the fact that we aren’t talking face-to-face makes it very easy for people to say things to each other they’d never say to someone in person.  If you are tempted to start an Internet argument, think: is that the kind of legacy you want to leave online?

I’ll bet you’re skeptical about my last piece of advice.  After all, you might be thinking, I have locked down my Facebook profile so only my friends can see it, I deleted my MySpace because I never used it, and I deleted those posts on that message board that I felt embarrassed about later.  You may have deleted information, and you may think you’ve locked it down, but the truth is that Facebook’s privacy policy contains the following caution:

[P]lease be aware that no security measures are perfect or impenetrable. We cannot control the actions of other Users with whom you may choose to share your pages and information. Therefore, we cannot and do not guarantee that User Content you post on the Site will not be viewed by unauthorized persons. We are not responsible for circumvention of any privacy settings or security measures contained on the Site. You understand and acknowledge that, even after removal, copies of User Content may remain viewable in cached and archived pages or if other Users have copied or stored your User Content.

In other words, even if you deleted information, it might be available to others because a friend saved a version of it somewhere and posted it online.  Also, hackers can and have penetrated secure pages in Facebook.  And Facebook is telling you in their Privacy Policy, which you most likely didn’t read thoroughly when you signed up, that they are not responsible for any harm that comes as a result.  In addition, a friend can take embarrassing pictures of you and post them on his/her own profile, even if you’d never have it on your own.  The bottom line is that you should not fool yourself into thinking that only people you have friended can see your profile.

In addition to concerns about what you post on Facebook, you should also be aware that most Web sites on the Internet are cached.  What that means is that Google or Yahoo and sites like them regularly create caches of all the Web sites their search engine robots crawl because it’s considered useful for Internet users.  The bad news is that if you post something you later regret that you take down, it may still be available in cached form.  Google’s cache will eventually refresh and the information will be deleted, but Yahoo’s cache becomes part of the permanent Internet Archive.  This site is really handy in that if someone decides to stop maintaining a Web site that had useful information, you may be able to find it.  In fact, I have done so on many occasions for projects you might have worked on in my classes.  One of the biggest usability problems on the Web is that Web pages are not always maintained, and this site helps users access this information later; however, it also saves information you may have thought was gone forever.  What can you do if embarrassing information is archived on this site?  You can petition to have it removed from their archive, but you will have to prove you own the site.  And if you don’t own the site, and the site’s owner doesn’t want to help you out, there’s probably little you can do about it.  The bottom line?  Be careful what you post online in the first place, and you won’t have as many problems.  Don’t let people take pictures or video of you doing things you’d rather not have broadcast — lots of famous people need to learn this lesson!  If someone does post a picture or video of you that was taken or filmed without your knowledge and consent, you probably have some grounds to pursue legal action, but the burden of proof will be on your end.

One final concern about online safety that I’ll share concerns file sharing.  It is copyright infringement to share free music longer than thirty seconds (in most cases), and it is copyright infringement to rip content from DVD’s and post them to YouTube.  You might not go to jail, depending on circumstances, but you can pay heavy fines.  For the purposes of copyright protection, individuals older than sixth grade can be held responsible for knowing how great a portion of some item of media content that it is permissible to share, which means you are old enough to be held responsible if you infringe copyright.  Read this site to learn what you need to know about how much you can share.  Note that these guidelines pertain to fair use for educational purposes, and not to peer-to-peer file sharing, such as BitTorrent, LimeWire, or Napster.  If you share even small portions of material for non-educational purposes, you are most likely infringing copyright.  Try checking out Creative Commons for work that you can use just by attributing it to its creator.  In some cases, all you have to do is agree to allow others to use the same work and not to use it for commercial purposes, but check the license on the work to be sure.

You can learn more about staying safe online at GetNetWise.