While I was writing my papers for my next course my son told me that the laptops lamp was blinking. I immediately covered it with a non-transparent tape and started to google about it. Frightening facts that I have read about have made me write this article.

With technology, it is so much easier for a parent to reach his or her child and check if everything is okay. GPS-tracking, messaging, calls, monitoring of the online activities, security cameras – all sorts of things are at hand for the parental peace of mind. Unless they come to think that all those nasty, criminal types have access to technology as well, and use it quite inventively to peep, stalk, and target.

The cases when webcams installed to monitor and protect, were hacked, and the video from a child’s bedroom streamed online for any web surfer to see, make us reconsider: does technology really make our life (and our children) safer, or does it bring more risks to the table? How one measures the probability of a smart thing being compromised against the probability of it averting a dangerous encounter?

Some experts in internet security are convinced that rather than monitoring, parents should invest more time in conversations about safety and be a part of their children online experience, gradually stepping back and giving their children more freedom. That is a healthy and viable approach for any activity and has been exercised since the time immemorial. However, teenagers since that very time have been prone to breaking taboos and taking risks, so whatever you teach them – there will come a day when they will prefer to “forget” it.

Sometimes parents themselves expose children to all the dangers they fret in the first place, by sticking surveillance devices in every corner and covering their children head to toes with trackers, making the former into a walking bundle of big data. A possibility of tracking an iPhone down and finding out the position of its holder is an excellent way to learn whereabouts of your child or to locate your device if it was lost or stolen. However, if you don’t take necessary measures, these GPS data can be obtained by a third party and location of your child will be known to not-so-trusted individuals. So, is technology to blame for the breaches, or is it the ignorance of the user, who chooses to go with the default password or creates similar vulnerabilities?

This problem is older than the very word “technology”, which actually derived from the Greek for “craft” and “knowledge”. It is a sophisticated tool we must master if we want all the benefits without concurrent risks, not magic that just makes our life wonderfully simple and never backfires.

However, there are two sides to each thing. If we are tech-savvy enough and well versed with a particular piece of technology, can we be hundred percent sure that our data are safe? That is a tricky question because sometimes we have to trust with our data to someone else – servers, companies, their employees.

People grow increasingly concerned about the safety of their personal information kept in the cloud or other digital storages. It is true, most loud recent cases of big security breaches were caused either by user negligence (turning off the security solution, choosing the weak password like 123456) or by the carelessness of those, whose primary responsibility was to take care of user’s data safety. If we do have a systematic problem with technology and security that cannot be pinned on an individual user, it is the lack of safety experts in big companies, because they think that hiring and retaining highly sought responders and forensics experts is an item of wasteful expenditure.

However, huge leaks are usually the case with banks, gaming platforms, and other lucrative targets. In our daily life, it is in our own power to protect ourselves and fend-off the potential threats before we need digital forensics. Technology becomes more user-friendly each day, but it does not mean that using it does not require any skill to wield it. Will you blame the knife for cutting a finger or the person’s slip-up?

When people blame all-pervasive tech for the woes it brings to their children, they do not realize how ignorant they are in the first place, to let them use it without proper tuition and supervision. They would not let their children play with matches or kitchen knives, so why do they let them play with a smartphone that has neither restrictions nor controls as early as 7 years old, let alone younger.

Parental controls and monitoring should not be an intrusion on privacy and hovering, but a safety net to back the children up, in case they make a bad decision. Moreover, open monitoring (when a child is aware that her parent is watching) makes children and tweens more confident and less anxious about unpleasant things they meet online (such as trolls and bullies). The experts established lower levels of distress and conflict in those 8-grade students who have been openly monitored while learning how to navigate the environment of social networks.

It should be mentioned that monitoring also moderates their own behavior: children do not take unnecessary risks and express themselves more politely in chats. This way parents help their children to socialize in the new medium in a healthy way. It is much like showing them how to swim by supporting and gently letting go, instead of just tossing them in the water and letting figure it out on the go.

Yet here is the trick: to make technology safe for your children, and teach them using it responsibly, you must first know the ropes yourself. At the end of the day, everything comes down to our own ignorance, which correlates directly with potential dangers of the technology. People, who use technology without understanding the basics of digital safety, will most probably come across certain downsides. Yet today, technology also provides us with all necessary means against the dangers it imposes in the first place. It is our own creation and it is wonderfully balanced from this point of view.

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