Chat Rooms

Parents listen very carefully, Chat Rooms are the most dangerous place your kids can be when they are online. Do you know what one is? Well a chat room is a gathering place for people on the internet to talk but you type instead of talking.

There are generally three major products and they are all free. Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo Messenger and AOL Messenger and there are many others. You generally have to log into an account that you create. Next you go to the chat-rooms and enter one.

Once inside you can "talk" to the group of people in the room. You can sit back and just read what everyone else is talking about. You can also start a one on one conversation with anyone you want. These one on one conversations or "private" conversations are very dangerous.

Remember on the web you can be anyone so the person your 15 year old daughter is talking to that says they are a 15 year old girl could very well be a 35 year old man with other things on his mind.

These private chats can also be very dangerous because many of them allow you to upload pictures often called "sharing" those pictures can be of anything. Even more dangerous is the "web cam" inside of these private chats you can allow someone to see you live by allowing them to view your web cam if you have one. Remember ANYTHING YOU SEND OVER THE INTERNET IS AVAILABLE TO BILLIONS OF PEOPLE. I can not stress this enough.

Provocative screen names or screen names that say anything personal about you are bad names. Do not use first or last name, do not use addresses or postal codes, do not use the year you will graduate or your age, do not use the name of your street or school. Keep it very generic "pizza-lover", "ilovemusic" or something more creative but keep it generic.

The chat rooms often have themes or topics as well, so it is very wise to stay out of rooms with themes or topics that make you uncomfortable. IM or Instant Messaging is also big. Kids can send messages to each other and they are received immediately after being sent.

Either to the persons computer or to their cell phone. Yes you heard me right to their cell phone today you can send a message from a computer to a phone and not just a message. Today you can send text messages, pictures and even videos to a cell phone and the other way around from cell phones to computers.

The statistics I will show you below comes from a recent survey. You should be astonished at it's results. The results showed that:

> Two in five online teens (42%) said they’ve posted
information about themselves on the internet so others
can see it and contact them.

 
> Nearly one third of online teens (30%) said they’ve talked
about meeting someone whom they’ve only met through
the internet

 
> More than one third of these online teens (37%) said
they’ve received a link to sexually explicit content.

 
> One in four (27%) said they’ve talked online about sex
with someone they never met in person. And, nearly one
in five (19%) reported knowing a friend who has been
harassed or asked about sex online by a stranger.

 
> Nearly half of the teen respondents (47%) admitted
that they’ve used code words to alert others online
to a parent’s immediate presence—an effort to
disguise a conversation about which a guardian
might not approve.

» More than one in four (28%) said they use such lingo daily.

To read the entire report by the Polly Klaas foundation click here


You as a parent can not trace these chat room conversations, These conversations leave no traces on your computer. The only way to find out what is being said, shown or uploaded is with software. If you think you have a problem you need to get the software whether it is free or you purchase it.