Chatting with Strangers – How to be Safe?

There are numerous sites that promote chatting with strangers, how to be safe? Most sites have several ways to chat on their sites. Safe mode, regular mode when talking on sites geared to children and younger people. This is geared to sites by age groups. It is possible to chat on dozens of sites on the web that offer chatting with strangers.

Kids love to play on gaming sites. They use microphones or they talk through face-to-face chat situations. Face to face chatting is fine as long as they are chatting with people they know. Most are interested in exploring the new and different, but this is extremely dangerous in chat room situations.

Kids using gaming chat sites will sometimes find themselves bullied through conversations. Age and resident questions are asked and kids feel intimidated and answer these questions, failing to protect their personal information, Anonymous chat sites that promote chatting with strangers, how to be safe? Going to websites is a very popular way to chat. Some chat with strangers or family and friends. Knowing how to be safe when chatting with strangers is very important when doing this on sites.

Many know that chatting with strangers on anonymous chat Websites about their personal information is dangerous. This enables those strangers to hack and bully them, leaving them feeling helpless. Bullying is universal and comes in numerous forms. When it happens in a chat room, sometimes kids do not understand that with onsite tools they have the power to shut them down. These people try to make children believe they are all powerful. This of course is untrue, but a child may not see things this way, unless, a parent tells them.

Chatting with Strangers: Texting

Talking with words is one of the leading ways people communicate with one another on the Web. This can be done on sites but there are different levels of conversation. The limited conversations are already designed and kid’s games allow the parents when a chat situation is set up to designate the security level of the game. However, this is difficult with teenagers since it is not difficult for most of them to have the parental email sent to themselves. The computer sitting in a public forum is best. Again, with the onset of mobile devices, it is a good idea to teach young people what to look out for on anonymous chat Websites and how to shut them down.

Use an area of the home that is impersonal when chatting on anonymous chat sites. Make sure background noise leads to no distinction between where you live or family information. Chat by text messaging. It is easy to feel threatened in some communications so many sites have blocked communications. This prevents the person from contacting you. It is possible to file a complaint and block a person from communicating with you. With some sites, you can only chat with the people you select to see of verbally talk to and allow no new people to contact you.

Public forum in the home

Keep kids in a public area of the home. One of the biggest problems with online chatting is that it is a big part of the games kids play online. Sadly, the people playing are not always kids and parents will notice the little things that sometimes give them away. The names they chose or inferences to things that are way beyond the years of an eight-year-old. If the computer is placed in the earshot of parents, when a child is asked personal questions or certain keywords are heard, the red flag can go up. Most sites have a way to ban these people or you can bar your child from being contacted by them.

In the age of online chatting about everything, relationships, cooking, science, sex and identity theft on anonymous chat sites, it is necessary to give young people formal training on how to protect themselves on the Web. There is no way to know who is chatting with you online. Even if you meet a person face to face there is no way of knowing if they are really who they say they are. It is said; that online you can be who you want to be. Although, companies work to verify information it is still a whoever you say you are game.

Online sites which are used primarily to encourage unsuspecting individuals of any age to chat with strangers are becoming more common and pose a greater threat to youth and to vulnerable individuals than ever before. The updated warning from parents to kids needs to shift quickly from “don’t talk to or take candy from strangers” to “don’t visit online sites to talk with strangers or give any information to anyone online.”

Candy isn’t even the biggest threat anymore! An innocent Internet user may believe that merely talking to a nice person over the Internet isn’t dangerous. That’s true, right? VERY WRONG! Giving information of any kind while talking online to a stranger is risky even if the informant does not disclose identity or any contact information to the recipient of the information because of the existence of tracking capabilities which can be used silently by a perpetrator trying to obtain information from a child or vulnerable individual.

In this information age, we are unfortunately often victims of too much information or the wrong type of information. Now, what we don’t know CAN hurt us, as never before. Being able to communicate this potential to vulnerable individuals is far more difficult than it would seem. It is hard to present a realistic view of the world as it exists without frightening people whom we simply want to protect for their own good. Often, that effort is not seen in the light in which it was intended. Authority figures are forced to tread gently when they really want to be emphatic in warning the people they need to warn to avoid turning them off entirely.

The popular search engine Google lists the “Top 15 Chatting Sites” in an easy-to-perform search, which search also reveals sites labelled as “naughty” sites and additionally sites for families to chat together and even a site offering humorous chats as entertainment. The total range of available chats, then, is not totally a dark world full of porn and people hoping to prey on others. There are avenues for such sites if individuals want to seek them out. The reality of advertised online chat sites is not all about sex and stalking. Individuals becoming involved with such online chat sites must exercise judgment about which sites to associate with and what they are hoping to find because anything is possible!

The question arises of who exactly would be so desperate for communication that they would intentionally pursue a complete stranger for that purpose. Various adults and children do this very thing when given the opportunity. Lonely or bored kids using the Internet for entertainment are vulnerable to a whole new world of threats and input from strangers.

Because of this inevitable situation, persons in authority must take appropriate steps to prevent vulnerable individuals from being victims of their own naivete. Parents and authority figures need to take a resoundingly unpopular stand by curtailing potentially dangerous behaviour on the part of their kids and charges by establishing a mechanism which ideally prevents impressionable individuals from engaging in risky behaviour which could later come back to hurt them.

The situation being fought against does not necessarily involve an issue of trust as much as it involves wanting to protect vulnerable persons from allowing someone to prey on their vulnerability and powerlessness. This need to protect will require authority figures to devise mechanisms.

The careless communication with an Internet stranger not only jeopardizes the speaker but also compromises the safety of family members or friends, depending on the extent of the information shared. Unscrupulous individuals routinely troll. The Internet is in search of willing, unsuspecting individuals to converse with. Unaware of the potential danger they may be opening themselves to, the vulnerable individuals take the proffered bait of friendship and respond to the conversation.

Unsuspecting individuals and their families are vulnerable to a whole new world of threats and input from strangers. Because of this inevitable situation, persons in authority must take appropriate steps to prevent vulnerable individuals from being victims of their own naivete. Parents and authority figures need to take a resoundingly unpopular stand by curtailing potentially dangerous behaviour on the part of their kids and charges by establishing a mechanism which ideally prevents impressionable individuals s to protecting the people they want to protect.

Internet controls intended to curb this behaviour are not as effective as one would hope because a whole industry has grown up around trying to defeat the controls. The answer, then, would seem to lie in instilling a sort of discipline in the individuals needing protection from themselves. Making those individuals see the need to govern their actions is harder than it sounds, and may not be a totally realistic option. Because this is not the sort of thing that can be fixed by legislation or enacting laws. Resorting to government controls is not a practical situation either.

There are already laws on the books which purport to make some of this illegal; those laws are not effective at saving people from themselves or people determined to cause harm. Immature, inexperienced individuals of any chronological age are generally unaware of the risks that may come from interacting with strangers over the Internet. This awareness is a skill that must be taught by sharing knowledge about what could go wrong by sharing the wrong thing with the wrong stranger.

Interacting with individuals over the Internet by visiting a site to chat with a stranger can put the person seeking friendship from the chat in danger of bullying over the Internet. Just because the perpetrator does not have access to the victim to commit physical harm does not mean that bullying cannot occur. Bullying happens whenever fear or intimidation is involved.

When the perpetrator acts or speaks in such a way that a sense of fear and intimidation is experienced by the victim, that victim has been bullied as surely as if the victim has a black eye or other wounds. Bullying does not require a physical manifestation to be real; that is why it is so insidious and hard to detect or control. Cyberbullying is a very real threat to the vulnerable, immature, inexperienced, or unaware.

Outlawing sites to chat with strangers would involve the abridgement of rights fundamental to living as Americans. While the U.S. Constitution does not specifically deal with whom a person may talk or associate, it does guarantee certain “inalienable rights” which presumably include the right to freely associate with others. Simply because certain individuals make questionable choices when deciding whom to befriend or contact does not mean that the government should place controls on citizens’ right to free assembly, which is an elongated stretch of this basic principle.

Education about the potential damage capable of being caused by an injudicious decision to visit sites to chat with strangers should be used as a means of protecting individuals who might be victimized through such interaction. But to curb what individuals may or may not say on those sites would be a limitation of the right to free speech. The most proper vehicle for that control lies within the family.

Despite the fact that not all families operate like the ideal sitcom family of Beaver Cleaver, there is no place in government to absorb the responsibility of protecting individuals who troll the Internet looking for friends to chat with. The liberties upon which the United States was founded have been secured for Americans at the price of human lives. Those liberties should not be swept away to prevent bad decisions or unfortunate choices made by people who are unable to understand the consequences of their choices in whom to chat with or befriend. Affecting those choices is not within the purview of the American government to maintain.