Internet Safety

Internet Safety

Each month this page will be dedicated to a specific topic about Internet Safety. You will find useful information and tips about the Internet.

The month of May we will be focusing on the topic:

Personal WebPages

One of the great things about the Internet is the opportunity for anyone to publish something of their own, whether that be webpages about their favorite sports team or music celebrity, personal or family news, political views, or obscure obsession. There are a huge number and variety of individuals' web pages online, including some very professional family and personal websites intended to keep relatives and friends up-to-date.

Many young people will also make webpages for educational purposes, such as for a school project, as a contribution to the school website, or if they choose to take part in a Internet contest such as the ThinkQuest challenge. www.thinkquest.com

Even though it is a great thing, there are precautions that should be taken!

Common problems

Think before you publish online. Consider the kind of potential hazards explained below and decide how to make your webpages special while minimizing the risks.

Personal information might be misused by other people who read the details on your webpages, so think hard about what information you want to make public on the web and what information you want to keep private. For example, if you give name and address and say on your pages how much you are looking forward to your holidays in August, you just may attract burglars! Publishing your phone and fax numbers may result in crank and sales calls. Be cautious as well with financial and employment information, as you don't want criminals attempting to obtain loans, credit cards or purchases in your name.

Photographs with names liven up your personal webpages, but there are risks here. Identifying your family members and their activities (e.g. the school they attend) makes it easier for someone to attempt to meet them, and greet them by name. There is also the chance that someone will copy the photo and then use image-manipulation software to create a very different and offensive picture. So consider not identifying family members in captions and not using close-up photos.

Email addresses are a standard feature of personal webpages, as they encourage web visitors to get in touch with you and share their comments. Some adults will prefer to check all incoming email in case an unsuitable comment is made or a strange person tries to contact your child. Be aware also that having your email address on a webpage often results in you receiving junk emails (known as "spam", and which are often pornographic), because some people use special software to trawl through webpages and collect email addresses which they then sell to advertisers.

Similarly, having a "Guestbook" feature on your website where visitors write comments, can attract unpleasant remarks and you may want to check it regularly and clean it out if necessary.

Text that you write for your webpages is another area for care. Libel laws still apply to webpages, and you must not write and publish things about people or organisations that you know to be untrue or which damage their reputation unfairly. If you discover a webpage that treats you like that, you should complain first to the person who created the pages (if they are named with contact details on the site), or to the company on whose webserver the pages are "hosted" as they can block access to those pages.

Copyright is an issue for any webpage creator, and many people make use of images and other files that they do not have the right to publish online. You should always ask for permission (which may be refused) to use any files that were created and owned by other people or companies, including photos, graphics, animations, audio and video clips, etc. Files taken from one medium to another, such as images grabbed from TV shows or scanned in from magazines, are a particular problem. Legal action can be taken against you if you ignore the rights of copyright owners and publish their material without permission.

The Security of your webpages should concern you, as you wouldn't want someone else (known as computer hackers) altering your pages, changing what you said or adding obscene pictures or web links. One basic measure to protect yourself against hackers is to keep private the User ID and password for your personal space on whichever webserver hosts your pages. If the content of your pages is altered by someone else, contact the provider of the webspace that you use and ask them to check out the problem.

Schools are usually cautious and would have a staff member check any pages produced by pupils as part of a school project or website before the pages are allowed to go online. This is a precaution to ensure that the youngster doesn't give away personal data and that the webpage doesn't lead to any legal problem for the school (such as unauthorised use of copyrighted images owned by someone else).

At home it would be a good idea to agree a similar check with your children, that they let you see any webpage they create before they publish it. It gives you a chance to be sure that you are content with what they are saying and showing about themselves and their interests.