Every week e-safety adviser Alan Mackenzie sends me weekly updates. They are useful teaching resources but also parent guides to keep you up to date with current trends.
Here are a few tips from this week’s updates:
For Parents – Discord Family Center
Discord, the app, is still very popular particularly with gamers and like many apps it has safety features, including features for parents/guardians. The Discord Family Center is quote a tool built to help parents and guardians stay informed and involved in your teen’s Discord experience while respecting their privacy and autonomy unquote. The safety features have recently been updated and now include:
- Ability to view the activity feed.
- Get weekly email summaries,
- Manage safety and privacy settings.
To find out more about these features and more, and how to set up Family Center you can view the Discord Family Center HERE. There is also a parent hub which has lots of information and resources for parents such as user controls, moderation, reporting and more. You can find the parent hub HERE.
For Parents – Shopping Scams
Every year hundreds of thousands of people here in the UK fall victim to fraud when buying something online. With Xmas and Xmas sales rapidly approaching, fraud and scams will be significantly on the increase.
GetSafeOnline has a plethora of information to help with this such as:
One piece of advice I couldn’t see on either of these pages is related to the legitimacy of the company. Particularly on social media such as Instagram I will often see ads for things like clothing and gifts which look interesting and unique. When I click on the ad to take a closer look I will always tap on the 3 dots on the top right and tap on “open in external browser.” The reason for this is that if it is a company I’m not aware of, I want to know the details of the company before I purchase. Often when I go onto the website there are no company details, no contact details (apart from a web form), and either no reviews or perfect reviews. These are all red flags to me and I would never purchase from such a site.
