Being safety conscience when it comes to our online activities, is something that a lot of people fail to maintain in their everyday lives. This is a largely due to people not acting ethically when it comes to themselves and others, its easy to make this mistake such as uploading photos of yourself and friends without they’re express permission.

Its my belief that the reason so many people fail to act ethically is down to the fact that, we as a society have become so accustomed to sharing our lives, thus we miss vital steps in protecting not only our own privacy and safety, but we most definitely more often than not fail to take into account theses things when it comes to others.

The best thing we can do in order to combat this growing problem, is to begin instilling responsible behavior in children from the moment they begin interacting in online environments, even if this is simply browsing YouTube or playing an online video games with their friends.

So where do we start? Simply sitting down with children and discussing how they can keep safe , enabling safe search filters is a good step to protect children from websites they shouldn’t see, but the internet is a big place and they will inevitably stumble across things you may not want them to see.

Younger children below the age of thirteen should only use the internet with supervision from an adult, due to their inability to identify what is and isn’t safe, not just websites but children are far more susceptible to flashy pop up ads which can often link to inappropriate or malicious websites they shouldn’t see, a helpful tool to reduce exposure to pop ups is to enable an ad blocking program.

Parental control apps will also help to filter out inappropriate content on YouTube and Netflix, these sites have these filters built into the account system to aid parents, but especially in regards to YouTube there is always going to be content that slips through the cracks.

As children get older and become teenagers, you will have to loosen the leash on their online activities, this brings with it a whole set of new problems, this is why it is important to help them develop a tool set when approaching online problems with critical thinking being key to this, one great tool every child no matter their age,(even some adults could be considered children), like for instance the crap test.

Personal responsibility must be hammered home, especially as teenagers begin to enter the social media space, they must become very aware of everything they post, whether it be a post about how horrible their KFC meal was, to a picture of themselves with their friends at the beach.

Being responsible online isn’t just about safety, its also about taking into account others in a virtual space, a simple image edited as a joke towards a friend could begin a landslide of bullying towards that person, while this more often than not would just be a silly new nickname the potential is very much there for something like this to become much more serious.

This is also true of private messaging sensitive information about your friend, or even information in regards to yourself, once its posted it doesn’t go away and all it takes is for you to leave your phone unlocked on a table, or logged in on a school computer for that information to leak.

More importantly is anything you send out onto the internet is permanent, no matter how quickly you delete something, you’ve still left a mark in the sand, and it can’t ever fully be swept away.

Thus if children don’t have these lessons hammered into their the tiny brains early on it can lead to the rise of extremely problematic behavior such as sexting and sending inappropriate photos of themselves, these photos are never going to go away, not only this but young people are morally irresponsible and will show off any pictures to their friends without a thought for the consequences.

By making children more responsible online we can hopefully avoid this sort of behavior from becoming even more common, but its my belief that its not just the responsibility of the user to maintain ethical practices, the onus is also on digital juggernauts like Facebook and Twitter to maintain a safe online society.

Not even two years ago Facebook was the target of a  major congressional hearing, the focus of this hearing was the unethical actions of the social media giant when it came to gathering information from users accounts.

While there was a positive outcome from this trail in that Facebook began to apply the Europeans Unions General Data Protection Act, for all of its users the sad fact that it required them to be taking before such a high level court before coming to this decision shows how flippant they had been towards the privacy of peoples data before.

No matter how careful a user is being in regards to the information they post online, that information is always being analysed and sold off without their knowledge, then their privacy is being breached regardless of their own actions.

That’s why I believe it is so absolutely vital that parents and schools place a greater emphasis on providing children with the skills they’re going to need, the world is already in a the digital age and it is one whose shape grows and changes at an extremely rapid pace.

If we don’t prepare future generations to be responsible online, then the potential for them to make harmful decisions to their futures is greater than it ever has been in the past.