Interent Safety

As a teacher I feel it is important to ensure that students understand the potential hazards of giving out personal information. There are many ways a person can accomplish this. I think you need to answer the so 'what if I do?' question.

Students also need to understand the power of information. How hard is it to exploit someone who you know nothing about. If you have a phone number, you can pinpoint approximate location and try to relate to them given general assumptions of what is prevalent in that area. For example someone with a (780) prefix you may assume loves the Edmonton oilers. Once someone makes you feel comfortable you are not as careful with the information you give them and this can be very dangerous.

One way to accomplish this would be to provide examples of how information was exploited. Use recent news articles; for example the boy whose 16th birthday party ended up trashed just recently. Or more serious situations where individuals have actually been abducted. To illustrate the power of information you could ask students to explore others profiles and learn as much about them as you can. They will be amazed at how free the information is and if someone had ill intents how easy it would be to take advantage of them.

Just make students aware of preditors and stress not to give out personal information.