PRIVACY. It’s the word of the year from dictionary.com. With reports of the NSA turning the internet into a vast surveillance platform, FBI agents and hackers monitoring citizens through home appliances, web-browser tracking cookies multiplying like rabbits, and information you post to social networking sites yourself, the loss of individual’s online privacy and the extensive […]
Don’t talk to strangers. Look both ways before crossing the road. These little warnings given to children by moms everywhere are meant to make them aware of their surroundings. Even when we’re grown, we still follow these suggestions. In anticipation of National Cyber Security Awareness Month and the European Cyber Security Month, we asked AVAST […]
Recently, we have seen many Facebook posts with links leading to applications called Give Hearts, Drink It Up and Daily Horoscope. The applications are very popular – they have over 5 million monthly users – and are managed by the same provider called App Discovery Engine. The posts attracted my attention because they seem to […]
The SnapChat smart phone app is one of the newest crazes for teens because it allows a user to send what they believe to be a very private and very temporary photo to another user (and if you use it just for fun with friends, it can be a blast). Because SnapChat (seen below, yellow icon) Read more…
Millions of users access social networks every day in order to share, engage, and look for information as well as entertainment. The transparency of social networks come with a risk and we very often expose ourselves to hackers and scammers that can take advantage of information we share. Social platforms constantly improve security and privacy […]
A quiet headline last week was a win for family safety online when a Florida fraternity lost its national charter for alleged slanderous and drug-related Facebook posts. Not only did the National arm of Pi Kappa Alpha, or Pike, disband the fraternity’s chapter but Florida International University, also ordered the fraternity to cease all meetings Read more…
If your son or daughter is headed off to college this month, don’t shrink back on your commitment to family safety online. Being a college freshman at 17 or 18 doesn’t mean their wisdom download is at 100% complete (far from it). The words “privacy” and “dorm” don’t often show up in same sentence but Read more…
It’s easy and fast to download apps to your smartphone. They do everything from identify a song you just heard to turning your phone into a flashlight. But there are secrets beneath the fun apps. See how knowledgeable you are about the risks associated with free and paid apps for your smartphone. Answer the question, […]
Anonymity affords a precarious, irresistible power to teens online. Ask.fm is one app that’s exploding in popularity by allowing users to ask and answer questions to one another anonymously. While Ask.fm is used by many teens as a digital playground to flirt and just have fun (and confess crushes), the lack of a name or Read more…
Millions of users access Social Networks every day in order to share, engage, and look for information as well as entertainment. The transparency of social networks come with a risk and we are very often expose ourselves to hackers and scammers that can take advantage of information we share. Social platforms constantly improve security and […]