Today I had the privilege of joining the 5th Annual National Teen Summit on Internet Safety via Ustream. In cooperation with Cox Communications, John Walsh and James Andrews held discussions with a panel of 11 teens regarding Internet Safety.

A recent survey conducted by Cox Communications shows that:

• 50% of teens allow unrestricted access to their online profiles
• 62% do not check with parents before posting photos
• 85% of teens now have mobile phones and profiles on a social network
• 30% of teens are not concerned that there will be accountability of what they post on their profiles

At the end of the summit, I looked over my notes and found the following themes to be prevalent between what the panel of teens, John, and James were saying:

• Parents must “parent up”! Privacy is earned. Know what your children are doing online. It’s our duty to parent and lead by example to our children.
• Parents must overcome the fear of learning about technology so that they can teach their children the proper use of those tools. This involves staying proactive and ahead of the curve.
• Parents must set up boundaries and guidelines up front for their children to follow as well as the consequences of breaking those rules.
• We must encourage children to speak up to the right authorities when they or someone they know are being bullied online.
• We need to encourage schools to  provide support and secondary education on Internet Safety.
• We must keep the lines of communication open with our children.

What action step do you need to take today to help ensure the safety of your children online?

Social Networking has become a great tool for keeping up with family and friends, and feeling connected by knowing what people are doing in their everyday lives. Had it not been for social networking, I might not have known in a timely manner that one of my friend’s daughters is in the hospital struggling with kidney failure. Or, I wouldn’t have known about my other friend reaching a fitness goal of running three miles this morning. Social networking had definitely given us almost a real-time synopsis of people’s lives.

Without meaning to, we may be sharing a real-time synopsis if our lives with the entire world! To help you make sure you are sharing information in the safest way, I’ve listed some Facebook privacy setting recommendations below.

First, let me address how to get to these settings. After you log into Facebook, click on the drop down arrow next to “Account” in the right hand corner. Choose “Privacy Settings” from the drop down menu. From here, you will be taken to the main privacy settings page seen below.

Personal Information and Posts
The Personal Information and Posts settings let you decide who can see your photos, videos, personal information, and post to your wall. My recommendation would be to set all settings under this category to “Friends Only”.

Contact Information
Contact Information settings allow you to choose who can contact you through Facebook and who can see your contact information and e-mail address. With the exception of allowing Friends of Friends to “Add me as a friend”, all other settings should be restricted to “Friends Only”. Applying these settings will help protect you from unsolicited e-mails and phone calls from people you do not know, or people that are being malicious towards you. It also helps protect your privacy from potential identity theft as well.

Friends, Tags and Connections
The Friends, Tags and Connections settings control what shows on your profile and who can see that information. This information contains your family members, what city you live in, where you work/go to school, what interests and activities you have as well as things you like. Again, this area could be a gold mine for people trying to mine information for identity fraud. I recommend settings all these areas to “Friends Only”. I would also recommend that you take some time to think about if you want to tag your family members. If you are prone to accepting “friends” that you really don’t know that well, definitely stay on the safe side of protecting yourself.

Search
Do you want your Facebook profile to show up in public search listings through Facebook search or a search engine such as www.google.com or www.yahoo.com? To allow a good balance of friends to be able to find your listing, choose “Friends of Friends” for the Facebook Search Results and consider disallowing search engines to show your profile in public search results.

Applications and Websites
Did you know that your friends and the applications written for Facebook can share information about you?
• What your friends can share about you: Uncheck Family and Relationship Status, Relationship Details, About Me, My Birthday, My Religious and Political Views, My Photos, My Videos, Photos and Videos I’m tagged in
• Activity on Applications and Games: Friends Only
• Instant Personalization Pilot Program: This program takes your friends list from Facebook and automatically tries to sync you together with your friends on other services such as Microsoft Docs, Pandora and Yelp. I choose to not allow this and connect manually to my friends and colleagues on these other sites.

Two other areas of importance are on your actual Profile page. To the left of your profile page, under you photo, there is a box titled “Information”, to the right of the word “Information”, you can click on the pencil icon to bring up a sub menu. This submenu lets you choose if you want to show your relationship status, current city, religious views and website address on your main profile page.

In addition, you can choose to not show your birthday or your sex in your profile. From your profile page, click “Edit My Profile” under your photo. This section also allows you to update your likes, education, work, relationships, profile picture, and contact information.

As you begin using or continue using social networking sites like Facebook, take the time to learn where privacy settings are and set them wisely. And, always remember, what happens on the Internet DOES stay on the Internet. Don’t post anything you would regret!

(June 1, 2010) BRISTOL, TN– Bsecure.com (formerly Bsafe Online), a trusted provider of Internet protection software for the family, announces the release of version 6.0, which utilizes its new “services in the cloud” delivery model called CloudCare®.

Bsecure Online’s new Web Control Panel is packed with a host of advanced features that simplify the difficult task of parenting and protecting children in the digital age.

Bsecure’s cutting edge CloudCare® technology gives parents the simplest installation and easiest to use software on the market today and offers comprehensive, out-of-the-box protection.

Bsecure 6.0 is filled with a list of customer-driven enhancements that address today’s issues of multiple PCs and multiple profiles, tracking social networking use, cyber bullying, controlling Internet access time, instant alert notifications, easy to read activity reporting and even an optional “adult protection” version for people struggling with temptation or pornography addiction.  In addition, along with expanded program control, Bsecure 6 enables the Safe Search features of Google, Yahoo and Bing automatically by default to guard against malware and phishing attacks.

Best of all, Bsecure 6.0 with CloudCare® technology is designed with key requirements in mind:

•    Speed - Most processing is performed on Bsecure’s servers, so the service will not slow down your Internet speed.
•    Accuracy and automatic updates - Bsecure 6.0 software and lists are continually and automatically updated on the server side, meaning no big downloads.
•    Anytime access - Anywhere, anytime access to your Web-based graphical control panel including at-a-glance activity reports, parental instant alerts and group control of multiple PC’s.

Bsecure Chairman and CEO Joe Gregory expressed, “I am pleased to announce the release of our Bsecure 6.0 version. Our advanced CloudCare services platform gives parents more tools to protect their children online, provides an exclusive maximum strength accountability option for those struggling with pornography, and uniquely positions Bsecure to rapidly roll out new protection features against emerging threats to Internet safety.”

In addition to enhancing its feature set, Bsecure 6.0 has also increased the number of predefined filter categories from 35 to an industry leading 58. This allows parents more flexibility in choosing what type of content is age appropriate for each child.

Bsecure 6.0 is being offered in “Internet Filter” and “Internet Filter plus Anti-Virus” versions. In addition, the “Internet Filter plus Anti-Virus” now covers three computers for one low price.

For more information visit Bsecure.com online at www.bsecure.com .

About Bsecure.com
Bsecure Online, based in Bristol, Tennessee, is a pioneer in the Internet filtering industry since 2001. Formerly Bsafe Online, Bsecure is consistently ranked as a leading provider of Internet family protection software in all 50 states and globally.
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Contact Information:
Tracie Coppedge
Bsecure Online, Inc.
618 Broad Street
Bristol, TN 37620
Phone (423) 968-4082 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting              (423) 968-4082      end_of_the_skype_highlighting
tcoppedge@bsecure.com