How to protect children from social network dangers

Azercell Telecom LLC, the leading mobile operator of Azerbaijan and Kaspersky Lab, international IT security company, calls for public attention regarding the recent crucial issue on “How to protect children from the dangers of social network”! According to Kaspersky Security Network’s Big Data, 75 percent of internet activity of children in Azerbaijan is related to communication which is primarily done on social networks.Given the averageworldwide rateof 63 percent, it may be concluded that young people of Azerbaijan are quite active users of social networks.

The experts point out several major dangers with social media. For instance, children may accidentally or deliberately enter web pages “for adults”. They include not only erotics or pornography, but also any kind of information on drugs, suicide, rape or weapon. The other danger might occur as a result of chatting with unknown people. The study shows that on average 14-16 year olds personnaly know 25 friends out of 47 in social networks. In such cases, it is impossible to know whether your chat peer at the other end is a child or a criminal.   

Another factor increasing the danger is that teenagers show their home address, school name and locations on social networks – 55 percent of respondents admitted doing it. Such information allows criminals to locate and identify them in reality very easily. In addition, children have recently experienced cyberbullying on social networks.

How to know if something is wrong with your child on social networks?

• Sudden adverse change of mood without any reason;
• Changing the style of usage of digital tools and social networks (child wakes up at night to access internet);
• Sharp increase/decrease of number of “friends” on social networks;
• Sudden “friends” with significant age gap;
• Abusive pictures and messages on personal page;
• Deleting social network account.

This list is not exclusive, but if you observe any of these factors in your children, you should immediately act on it.

Specifically to protect children online Azercell subscribers can exclusively use the Kaspersky Lab product “Kaspersky Safe Kids”.This program helps parents to control the usage time of the device to adjust the schedule of access to the Internet and receive reports about the time that the child spends on his gadget.In addition, it protects the child from viewing adult content, informs parents about the signs of cyberbullying, provides statistics of calls and SMS and much more.

To learn more about the threats to children online, as well as aboutthe ways of protection of young users pleasevisit the siteshttps://kids.kaspersky.ru/and https://www.azercell.com/safety/safekids .

For more information, please contact news@mcs.az

The leader of the mobile communication industry of Azerbaijan and the biggest investor in the non-oil sector Azercell Telecom LLC was founded in 1996. With 48% share of Azerbaijan’s mobile market Azercell’s network covers 80% of the territory and 99,8% of population of the country. Currently, 4,5 million subscribers choose Azercell services. Azercell has pioneered an important number of innovations in Azerbaijan, including GSM technology, advance payment system, 24/7 Customer Care, online customer services, GPRS/EDGE, M2M, MobilBank, one-stop- shop service offices Azercell Express, mobile e-service “ASAN signature”, etc. Azercell deployed first 4G – LTE services in Azerbaijan in 2012. According to the results of mobile network quality surveys of Global Wireless Solutions company and international systems specialized in wireless coverage mapping such as “Opensignal” and “Testmy.net”, Azercell’s network demonstrated the best results among the mobile operators of Azerbaijan.