Now your tween is a Teen, they fall into the Facebook guidelines of 13, as the minimum age to operate a Facebook account.  Many teens see joining Facebook as a passage into adulthood. Parents see it a little differently. So how do you ensure they can use it safely?

Even for an adult, Facebook’s privacy settings are as daunting as trying to do your taxes with an abacus. For teenagers, unaware of the consequences of their online actions, using Facebook incorrectly could potentially leave a...

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Thousands of people lose access to their social networking sites or email boxes with the most common being Facebook. The common term most people use is ‘hacked’. But in the majority of cases their password has simply been guessed.

 

Passwords are seen by some as a hassle. As such, they are often weak and easily guessed. Did you know the two most common passwords are ‘123456’ and ‘password’?

 

In our school internet safety presentations to students, we tell them it is unaccep...

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Have you ever wondered about how detailed the search feature has become on Facebook? Or thought how easy it now is to find people? 

It’s a fantastic tool for law enforcement agencies to find criminals, but not so good when our children don’t have appropriate privacy settings in place on their profiles. After all, Facebook builds all its search criteria on the information each user makes public. The less information filled out on a Facebook profile, the better.

Let’s take a closer l...

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Some of us may not realise that Facebook has an age restriction when going through the process of creating a profile.  Part of that process asked for your age.  If the user is under 13 years old, Facebook will not allow the profile to be created.  The minimum age is 13.

Yet this is easily bypassed, by changing the year you were born to another year.   The end result is that Facebook users are joining at a younger age.  Often, parents are the guilty party, as they are creating profiles fo...

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With the eminent demise of Bebo (www.bebo.com) , children are creating profiles on Facebook at a younger age.

 Facebook requires a user to be at least 13 years of age but children are giving false information about their age to allow them to create a profile. In some instances, children as young as 9 or 10 are on Facebook.



In most cases, parents have no idea what their children are doing on the internet. Many of us assume our children are too well behaved to go behind our back and do somet...
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Facebook in New Zealand is growing at an alarming rate. We now have almost 1.7 million users!

 Looking at the data more closely, it is great to see that over 45,000 of these users are 65 or older. I congratulate this group and it is a great way for them to not only embrace technology, but also keep in touch with family.



The results also show that 29,000 users fall into the age group of 13 or younger. Given that a user must be at least 13 to join Facebook, I wonder how many children are on F...
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As our education systems move more into the computer environment, the boundaries between the Teacher and student can become muddled. While some schools may setup a Facebook page for school related issues, the boundaries of friendship between a Teacher and student should never be crossed. 


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Research has shown that around 80% of children don't use privacy settings on social networking sites. There are several issues with this, and they all relate to how much information someone else can see about you. Employers are now searching social networking sites on prospective employees, to gain additional information on their personality. Photos of you engaging in out-of-hours activities can sometimes have a negative effect on a job prospect. Due to the many complaints FaceBook must ha...
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Even though there are many social networking sites in existance, the one that seems to attract the most attention is FaceBook. It attracts the the most attention because it has such a huge user base. In Australia, a recent survey has revealed that 29% of ALL time spent on the internet is on FaceBook. This figure is so large, that commentators are now referring to internet time as 'Facebook time' and 'Non Facebook time'. Australians also now spend more time on the internet than any other cou...
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