The other day I had the pleasure of talking with author, quilter, and fellow mom Meg Cox, who's updating her 2003 The Book of New Family Traditions, and – within seconds, as she was describing her plan for it – I was picturing all these potential tech-related traditions my work has turned up since 1997. Via emails, tweets, comments, and conversations, so many fellow parents whose stories have … [Read more...] about Summer’s ‘peaches more powerful than Apples,’ but…
geolocation
How cellphones get hacked
Amid the headlines and hearings about a British tabloid hacking cellphones, you may be curious about how that was done. You may also be curious about phone security for kids – I'll get to that in a moment. My ConnectSafely co-director Larry Magid explained in the Huffington Post how easily those hacks can happen. He writes of default PIN numbers (used sometimes by criminal hackers when people … [Read more...] about How cellphones get hacked
Disable geotagging on kids’ smartphones!
If your kids love to take, post, and tag photos with their cellphones and they use smartphones like an iPhone, sit down with them and figure out how to disable geotagging. What's geotagging? It's a bit of software code that smartphones automatically embed in digital photos when you take them, so that – when they're posted online – people can fairly easily map exactly where the photo was taken, … [Read more...] about Disable geotagging on kids’ smartphones!
Learning how to save lives in Facebook
In a very sad story reported in the London Evening Standard, hardly any of the 1,048 Facebook friends of Simone Back of Brighton, UK, did anything to try to prevent her suicide after she posted a status update saying goodbye, she was taking "all my pills." Her mother, who called the UK equivalent of 911 after someone texted her about the post, told the Evening Standard that no FB friends local to … [Read more...] about Learning how to save lives in Facebook
Amber Alerts on Facebook now
This makes sense – to extend the reach of missing-child alerts into social media. "Amber Alerts for missing children are now available as a news feed on Facebook," the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children announced today (here's coverage in WashingtonPost.com). It's really a sign of the times: Since people are now spending more time online than they are watching TV, according to a … [Read more...] about Amber Alerts on Facebook now