Sextortion - A Guide for Parents

With incidents of sextortion significantly on the increase around the world it's important that both professionals and parents know the signs and how to help and support their children. Although anybody can be targeted, the surge appears to be boys aged 14+ and the motivation is usually financial. In the past offenders would often threaten to share the victims intimate images with friends and family but that very rarely happened, however we are now starting to see this happen more frequently, including threats of physical violence and more. I've seen many of these chat logs, they're horrific!

Internet Matters have a really useful web page with lots of advice and support for parents and their children.

You can find the web page HERE.

YouTube and Artificial Intelligence

It won't be a surprise to anyone that AI generated content is now finding its way onto all the platforms that are popular with children, and that includes YouTube. Much of this content is benign, but as always bad actors will use it for their own gain. On a positive note YouTube has just updated their policy whereby any person uploading content onto YouTube and that content features synthetic media (e.g. generative AI), the user must disclose this when uploading.

However, what has surprised me is that YouTube has excluded children's animations from the disclosure process. YouTube is the most popular online platform by a large margin for children and we all know that content creators can exploit this for their own financial gain, clickbait, scams and much more. Creating new content for children is now easier than it ever was, you can create a script, animation, song and video in less than an hour using AI so children are going to be getting swamped with all this new content.

I really hope Google/YouTube change this policy as it's going to make things really difficult for children and their parents. You can see a full write-up about this in Wired magazine HERE.

Resource for 11+ - CyberFirst Navigators

In November last year the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) put together a series of videos to help young people stay secure online. The videos follow Olivia, Luca and Raheem and young people are able to make choices about the actions that should be taken in response to an account getting hacked. 

The resource is completely free and you can access from the NCSC website HERE.

For Parents - Disney+ Parental Controls Guide

Many children are tuning into their favourite shows on Disney+. Internet Matters have a really good guide for parents about the settings that are available to keep content at a level suitable to the age of their children. The full guide can be found HERE.