Chat Safety

How to stay safe while chatting online!

This page is all about chat safety, how to chat online and stay safe, what to do to chat safely and avoid risks of chatting. If you are often chatting, please bookmark this site and return back occasionaly to remind you about the risks of chatting. Also let your friends know about this page to help them stay away from troubles.

Why do we need to be safe or what's really happening behind the scenes?

Take a while to watch this video. You'll see how does it really look like behind the scenes when you are chatting online.

What if chat rooms were real?

What are the risks?

Although chatting online can be great fun, young people can sometimes find themselves in situations where they can feel out of their depth. Risks can arise when young people give out their personal details to strangers.

The online world can often seem very different to the real world for young people, and they can be tempted to say and do things that they wouldn't dream of if they met someone face to face. This can include giving out personal information such as mobile numbers and pictures of themselves. If they are talking to another child there is a risk that they will misuse this information - for example, by texting abusive messages to the child, or by posting their image on a website; but there is obviously a greater risk if the person that they are chatting to is an adult.

Unfortunately, paedophiles - adults who want to meet young people for sex - use the internet, often with the intention of talking with and meeting a child. Young people can be naïve to this risk, and often feel that they are invincible, or that 'they would know if someone was lying'. Young people will often 'swap friends' through IM, and therefore can be chatting to strangers who they feel they trust because a friend of a friend knows them. IM is a very intimate form of communication - more so than a chat room with many participants, and therefore child abusers will often use this as a means to extract personal information from a young person.

Basic safety tips for online chat rooms

• Anything you type in a chat room can be seen by everyone who is using that chat room so be careful what you type. In cyberspace the walls don't so much have ears as eyes.
• Choose an non identifiable, non gender specific screen name (and keep it clean!)
• Never give out any personal information whilst chatting online. That means your real name, telephone or cell phone number[s], mailing address, passwords, banking details etc. Ignore requests for personal information like A/S/L and be vague with responses to questions like WITW.
• Never accept files or downloads from people you don't know or from people you do know, if you weren‘t expecting them. This includes URLs.
• Never arrange to meet someone offline that you only know through chat room conversations.
• Make sure you know how to save copies of your chat room conversations.
• Make sure you now how to report problems to the chat room moderator.
• Remember your Netiquette and be nice! Don’t send mean chat messages, get involved in chat room arguments (flaming) or incite others to do so.
  
  

Chat Safe

It is easy to remain anonymous on the web and this can encourage some people to make up things about themselves, even passing off someone else's face as their own.

Sometimes people will give a false impression of themselves, either by exaggerating the truth or lying. A lot of the time you will instinctively know what another person is saying is odd or not quite right. This is your instinct, which acts as a self-defence, telling you something is wrong. It is important to trust these instincts and let your parent or carer know when you think something is wrong.

This instinct works best when you can see or hear a person, but obviously when talking to someone on the web it is not possible to do this so it is important to be even more alert.

The Chat Safe video shows how easy it is to be lulled into a false sense of security with someone you meet in a chatroom. But the following six points should help you to prevent this happening.

Chat Danger

Chat Danger is a site all about the potential dangers on interactive services online like chat, IM, online games, email and on mobiles. You can read there what happened to one family... or what makes a good chat room.

Chat about chat safety

 

Recapitulation

Again a short video to demonstrate it better.

Chatting on Internet

Chat Safety Links

www.chatdanger.com
www.fkbko.net
www.childnet-int.org
www.nch.org.uk
www.chatmag.com/help/safety.html
www.thamesvalley.police.uk/chatsafe/young.htm
www.wiredsafety.org/safety/chat_safety/index.html
www.wiredsafety.org/safety/chat_safety/chatrooms/index.html
www.ukchatterbox.co.uk/article/17