KATE STEWART: Child safety doesn't end at the front door

Kate Stewart

GROWING up as a child of two working parents was very different back in my day.

For starters you didn't need to be 14 years old to be home alone.

Looking back, the "hiding places" for the house key were almost laughingly obvious. Under a mat, pot plant or rock. It was a tell-tale sign of our naivety and innocence. Our view of society was far less jaded then. The thought of our kids being pursued and abducted by deviants was literally a foreign concept, it happened in other countries, not here in our little slice of paradise.

Then the unthinkable happened and everything changed. The daily ritual of walking to and from school was replaced, for many, with adult supervised drop-offs and pick-ups. Schools started keeping records of who was and wasn't allowed access to our kids and for others, the basic childhood norm of playing outside was no longer an option.

Right or wrong, many believed that keeping their kids confined to the home was the best way to keep them safe, but we needed to provide them with alternative methods of entertainment and thanks to technology, computers and gaming consoles quickly became the virtual babysitters that allowed parents to get on with their increasingly busy lives.

We never suspected that in the safety of their own bedroom they would become more vulnerable than ever to the very predators we were trying to protect them from.

Fast forward to today. Despite all that we have come to learn, all that we have been warned about and even the latest and greatest in online security measures and parental controls, can we confidently say that our kids are safe?

While we voice our outrage and indignation at the powers of the GCSB our kids are uploading selfies, from the very phones we have given them for safety purposes, which disclose their exact location, if they haven't switched it to a certain mode. With many people, not just kids, making hundreds of posts a day, how many are going to bother to switch to Airplane mode, to ensure their safety? When it comes to kids, I'm picking not many.

Truth be told, most adults are probably unaware of just how much personal information can be gleaned by the seemingly innocent posting of a selfie.

Yep, thanks to GPS, the precise co-ordinates of our children's bedrooms, bathrooms, schools and even the routes taken to and from are readily available to anyone with the will and the know-how. Every text, every pic, every post becomes a virtual footprint on a map that can literally lead the least desirable elements of society straight to your front door. It's as close as it gets to a personal invitation. It's seriously frightening stuff.

And it's just the tip of the iceberg. One problem area in an ocean of many. The more I discover about our vulnerability the more disturbed I become. I have never been one prone to paranoia but as I sit here now, typing this, my eye can't help but be drawn to the sticker that now covers the camera lens on my laptop. You can't be too careful. The once stereotypical image of the dirty old man lurking around the neighbourhood in plain sight, as disgusting as it is, almost seems preferable to the tens of thousands who now hide themselves in the shadows of the worldwide web. Often hundreds of miles away, they are now armed with the technical weapons that enable them to get closer than ever before. Now might be a good time to have another conversation with your kids about online safety and/or review your own.

-Kate Stewart is a politically incorrect columnist of no repute. She does welcome your feedback - investik8@gmail.com