During the last few days, there has been a significant increase in the number of reports of child abuse that have been registered in educational institutions. The increase could be a reflection of the dangerous viral challenges in different social networks, which push children and adolescents to commit violent acts, without measuring consequences, warned Miguel Ángel Gaspar, director of Paraguay Ciberseguro and Ciberpadres Latin America.
“Digital services today have a lot of content of a very large caliber for children to size, understand and assimilate. If we expose children to fake news or these challenges, which are viral, many times they alone do not have the ability to understand that it can cause complications and even death. That moment of digital solitude is taken advantage of by the circumstances of unscrupulous cybercriminals in order to seize the victim. This is the complex picture,” he noted.
Along these same lines, the cybersecurity expert indicated that the intention is not to “demonize” the Internet or its platforms, but to alert parents about the risks to which minors are exposed in digital solitude, without the accompaniment of their parents.
“We’re talking about when you give a child a phone, there are 5.7 billion connected nodes trying to figure out what your child is doing on the Internet,” he said.
For this reason, Miguel Ángel Gaspar emphasized the need to speak and be trained in order to understand the needs of minors and not abandon them in their interaction on the networks.
“Just as you take him by the hand to cross the street, so that he learns to cross alone. The same should be done on the Internet. The devices were made to be intuitive and they intuit, but parents prefer to believe that their children are nuclear engineers because of the digital age in which they were born, rather than being trained to assist children, ”she mentioned.
URGENT PARENTAL CONTROLS
To guide children and adolescents away from the risks of networks, the cybersecurity expert recommended the installation of “parental control” applications on electronic devices to, for example, limit the time minors spend on the Internet.
“Although there are really no free services on the Internet, because somehow they always take data from you as a means of payment, a free parental control service for Android is ‘Google Family Link’, which is enough for a first approach. In turn, IOS has its own parental control software. Windows or Linux have a parental control mode so that the identity of the children depends on the parents, ”she commented.
LAW TO PROTECT
The cybersecurity expert lamented the ease of access that children and adolescents have to harmful content such as pornography.
Thus, Gaspar commented that although during 2016 Law 5653 was already enacted, to protect minors from dangerous content or content that is not appropriate for their age, the regulations were never regulated.
“I am honored to be working now on the regulation of this law. Currently, there are no control filters. Hopefully, with the regulation, a good control can be carried out and the responsible entities are given arguments and tools to sanction those who deserve it, ”he concluded.
