How to protect your kids from online harm

They may reach out, develop trust, and ask seemingly innocent questions like, “Oh, you have a dog? What’s your dog’s name?” Using artificial intelligence tools, they then use permutations of this information in attempts to hack the online accounts of other family members.

“A child could be an effective channel for a criminal to gain that information,” warns Julie Kuzmic, senior compliance officer, consumer advocacy with credit bureau Equifax Canada.

A range of harms

As parents know only too well, children’s exposure to the internet comes with a range of benefits, but also lurking dangers. “There are potential harms to children as young as babies and toddlers all the way up to older teenagers—like 18, 19 years old,” Kuzmic says. Over that span they may be exposed to:

• Developmental harms. Exposure to screens and to seeing people and hearing voices online affects brain growth from infancy and can crowd out other activities crucial to cognitive development, like unstructured play and human interaction.
• Harmful content. Age-inappropriate content, misinformation, disinformation, and modified images can all negatively affect the child’s growth, learning, and judgment.
• Nefarious contact and exploitation. Of particular concern for parents is the potential for online predators to contact and develop relationships with their children for their own pernicious purposes.
• Privacy breaches and data collection. As in the example described above, criminals might obtain personal information to defraud or assume the identity of adult members of their household or the children themselves.
• Mental and emotional illness. Excessive social media use in particular has been linked to anxiety, depression, body image issues, sleep deprivation, low physical activity, and stunted social development.

Don’t assume kids know what they’re doing

Though they often appear technology-savvy, at times serving as IT support for their befuddled parents, “kids don’t have the life experience to know that not everybody is who they say they are,” Kuzmic says. At other times, they may “have a low awareness of the permanence of what they do online. Things they post and share may be available and visible for the rest of time, effectively, so there can be an impact well on later into their lives.”

They can be particularly vulnerable in their early teens as they begin to question their parents’ authority, push boundaries, and engage in higher-risk behaviour online. This coincides with the age when they might have their first bank and social media accounts and mobile phone.

“In an age-appropriate way, it’s important to have an ongoing conversation with your children about guidelines and expectations,” Kuzmic says. “At any age, think of protection as a layered and evolving situation. It’s not something that you talk about once and then it’s fine.”

Measures to protect kids from online harms

Safeguarding your offspring online requires a hands-on approach. “Allowing exposure to online activity maybe should come with training wheels, where parents are a little more involved at the start and are learning together with the kids,” Kuzmic says. Some steps she recommends include:

• Setting rules around internet access and the age at which children are allowed to access social media. Some families write it down as a contract that everybody can see and agree to.
• Imposing physical limitations, such as no devices after bedtime.
• Setting up digital limitations such as blocking platforms that screen out potentially undesirable content or a secure virtual private network (VPN).
• Prioritizing online safety. Explain why your kids should be wary of people who approach them online. Advise them to avoid random links, banner ads, or quizzes designed to lure them into unsafe spaces.
• Discouraging oversharing of personal information on social media.

Though bad actors target minors for a variety of malevolent reasons, they all zero in on children’s relative weaknesses, such as a desire to be accepted and befriended. Parents need to be there, Kuzmic says, to remind their kids that what might not appear to them to be a dangerous situation “might actually be a dangerous situation.”

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Digital security from Equifax Complete Protection

The hard part for parents—especially as their kids become older and increasingly independent—is they can’t be there all the time. For an additional level of online safety, consider Equifax Complete^TM Protection, a monthly subscription service that includes parental controls from Bitdefender to restrict which websites and apps your kids can access.

Other features of Equifax Complete Protection include: 

• Daily credit monitoring and alerts to notify you of key changes to your Equifax credit report, such as a new credit card or loan application. 
• WebScan, which monitors the dark web (hidden websites where criminals buy and sell data) to see if your personal information appears there. 
• Social media monitoring provided by industry leader ZeroFox, to alert you to suspicious activity on your social media accounts.
• Online data encryption by NordVPN and online password generation and storage by NordPass 
• Device protection from Bitdefender to help stop phishing attempts and protect devices from viruses and malware.

Equifax Complete Protection costs $34.95 per month. To learn more, visit the Equifax website.

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About Michael McCullough

Michael is a financial writer and editor in Duncan, B.C. He’s a former managing editor of Canadian Business and editorial director of Canada Wide Media. He also writes for The Globe and Mail and BCBusiness.

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