By Lynette Owens
Week of November 11, 2013
To help you keep up with what’s going on with kids, families, schools, and technology, we’ve compiled a list of stories, tips, and insights, we’ve found most useful over the past week. What have you been reading? Tell us below or Tweet @TrendISKF.
TEENS’ SAFETY CONCERNS: Last week, I attended the 2013 Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI) conference in Washington D.C. FOSI presented a new study on teens and identity theft and found that 51% of teens are very concerned about their identity being stolen. However, only 29 percent of teens think they that they are personally vulnerable to having their identity stolen. There were two other interesting data points that I gathered on the gap between attitudes and actions:
- 50% of teens have shared their usernames and passwords with someone, and of those, 16% were with parents and the remaining 34% with a friend or significant other.
- Teens were very interested in learning how to protect their identity from an outside expert versus a parent, teacher, friend or online resource.
Conclusion: we’ve got a lot of work to do!
UNIVERSITIES TRACKING STUDENTS ON SOCIAL: According to a Kaplan questionnaire, 30 percent of college admissions officers said they had discovered information online that had negatively affected an applicant’s chances of being accepted to a school. Universities like Colgate, Pomona and Southern Methodist University check on prospective students’ social activities and some high schools are working to prepare students for this process.
Conclusion: The key for students? How to balance using the Internet to highlight your strengths and stay connected to others while maintaining some privacy. In my opinion, being invisible online is not an option.
FIREFOX BLOCKING COOKIES?: Mozilla announced earlier this year that it plans to automatically block certain cookies from the Firefox browser in an attempt to prevent tracking of users’ information. However, this effort has been delayed with pressure from the ad industry and attempts to work with the Cookie Clearinghouse to reach a compromise.
YOUNG MOMS MORE SOCIAL: A new study by Experian claims that mothers of children under five are twice as likely to be active on social media as the rest of the U.S. population. Over half of moms with young kids in this particular group were between 25 to 34 years old.
MILLENIALS, SEARCH ENGINES, AND SOCIAL MEDIA: Great piece in Ypulse on millenials’ belief in the efficacy of search engines and social networks, and how it helps bring their generation together. @RyanCurrie writes: “Search dominates most online functions for Millennials, giving them the ability to aggregate the seemingly endless amounts of information online and provide a starting point for their journey down the rabbit hole of the internet.” I would argue, Ryan, that this is true of all of us, not just those born in certain years!
See you next week!
Lynette Owens is Vice President of Global Consumer Education & Marketing at Trend Micro and Founder of the Internet Safety for Kids and Families program. With 25+ years in the tech industry, Lynette speaks and blogs regularly on how to help kids become great digital citizens. She works with communities and 1:1 school districts across the U.S. and around the world to support online safety, digital and media literacy and digital citizenship education. She is a board member of the National Association for Media Literacy Education, an advisory committee member of the Digital Wellness Lab, and serves on the advisory boards of INHOPE and U.S. Safer Internet Day.
Follow her on Twitter @lynettetowens.