In my school, I don’t remember many lessons we had on cyber security or staying safe on the internet. They would have been few and far between at that time. However, I do remember 2 lessons we had on it. The first was when I was in about 3rd or 4th grade. We were pretty young, none of us even truly knew the internet, how it works. They decided to let us know by showing us one of those adds made to scare you off the internet. It was actually one we discussed in class, the “hey Sarah” add.
At the time it really surprised me and it did scare me a bit. I think it scared everyone away from wanting to post on the internet. I don’t remember if we even had a discussion about it.
The only other time we heard about cyber security was different. The entire middle years end of the school had been brought into the gym, and there was a guest speaker. I don’t remember if this was some company presenting this or just some expert the school called in, but none of us really payed attention to the presentation. We were in 8th grade at the time, who really pays attention to anyone at that age? She put on a presentation about what a digital footprint was. Finally at the end they played a video, one that I still remember.
Now, I’ll be honest, the main reason this stuck with me was because all of us at the time found it more funny that it was British than anything else. We had no idea why they chose a British video, we found it hilarious. We didn’t really take things seriously back then. We didn’t find out till later why we had received the presentation in the first place. Until one day the news from the high school end of the school reached the middle years.
A high school girl had sent nude photos to her boyfriend, and they were sent around the whole high school.
There was no coincidence here, the presentation and the prior events had to be related. Looking back at it, I have mixed feelings on on how the school handled the situation. I don’t know how the school found out about it. I never heard about any of the high school guys getting in trouble, so it seems like they had just heard the story with no proof of anything, the girl never seemed to have told them about it. Once they found out though, they worked fast on organizing a lesson. I’m not sure what happened in the high school end, but I’m glad they thought to educate the younger kids about it, even though none of us knew about it. It was a good message to send, but given the circumstances, I think they could have handled it better.
Rather than learning about what not to do on social media, how these posts can come back to haunt you, it should have been educating us about taking proper action on the internet. The lesson that day almost seemed to victim blame the girl for sending a nude in the first place, rather than the people who passed them around. In a way yes, this is an effective way to stop people from sending nudes, but today I think the real problem here were everyone else in the situation. The people who shared the poor girls private photos everywhere are much worse people than the girl who sent them to someone she probably trusted. I really can’t help but be disappointed in the people who knew and said nothing. The presentation should have definitely been more focused on anti-bullying style safety (see something, say something type of things), rather than “what’s on the internet is there forever” aspects.
As far as cyber security goes though, in my experience the scared safe approach does work pretty well. I’ve always been a bit cautious about anything I’ve posted on any platform of social media. I’ve never really accepted follows or friend requests from random strangers, and I definitely didn’t go anywhere near omegle like some of my friends did. The idea of that site still makes me shudder. When I was younger my friends and I played some games online, and I had never ended up telling any random strangers my real name, or anything about my life further from “I’m from Canada.”
My only complaints would be in how lacking it was on other aspects of digital citizenship. We really could have benefited from a few further lessons.