Technology Expert's Warning to Parents: Do You Know What Your Child is Doing Online?

In today's global and virtual world, the need for parents to have full control over their child's on-line activity has become a high necessity as compared to previous decades. With children as young as three years of age being increasingly savvy with technology, parents need to protect their families from becoming a statistic of on-line predators. I sat down with Technology Expert, Phil Temb of Atlanta-based TANKOH, a computer manufacturer and IT management company to talk about some interesting view points regarding Internet safety for children and the launch of their latest product for parents that have concerns about their children's vulnerability when surfing the net.

According to reports, three in ten victims of on-line child predator cases appear to be aged 6 and under - with five percent apparently younger than two years of age which runs parallel to the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) report, a division in charge of closing illegal Internet content. More than three quarters of these child victims are girls. Most parents have busy schedules trying to keep up with the current economy and may not have time to closely monitor their child's on-line activity.

A survey conducted by TANKOH, an Atlanta-based IT Management company, in 2009 proves that most parents with teens are worried about on-line dating activities, taking into account the most recent happenings of the "Craigslist killer". Today most children and teens meet new friends and partners on-line; however most of these individuals turn out to be vicious in nature. In this survey of over 1000 single mothers and parents, it was revealed parents are in deep need of computer technology that can help protect their children and deliver guaranteed safe content even in their absence. To answer this growing concern, TANKOH has created one of the first-line of computers specifically designed to help parents. TANKOH's signature computer package, Mommy & Me was created to help parents protect their children from various on-line dangers like child pornography, on-line sex offenders, child bullying, on-line vicious games and adult rated material. It also helps control and manages the access children have to networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace and YouTube.

Phil Temb, senior IT consultant at TANKOH explains, "Consider this scenario, a single mother is downstairs cleaning while her kids are on-line upstairs accessing adult rated content unintentionally, say by Googling 'boody' instead of 'body' - an honest mistake. Looking at both words, one generates adult content while the other does not." What if there was computer technology that could block the content and at the same time send an email or text to the parents instantly notifying them that their child just tried to access adult rated materials? "Well, those technologies now exist and our customers think it's pretty cool," says Temb.

Potential risks to children being Internet savvy are they also become emotionally vulnerable. Children are using the Internet for schoolwork, playing games, email, instant messaging, chat rooms, downloading music, shopping, and entering contests. Children are likely to know more about the Internet than their parents. More than fifty percent of the computer repairs handled by TANKOH over the past three years were due to inappropriate interactions with children on the Internet. "This resulted in viruses, spy-ware and even led to Identity Theft of many of our customer's information. And in many cases, we found nude pictures of children which their parents were not aware of," Temb shares.

With Mommy & Me computer package, you don't have to worry about those dangers because you'll know at all times what your child has access to on-line and what they're downloading. If you think this package is not for you, then consider this:

• According to the child safety protection agency young girls mostly between the ages of 9-13are sexually approached on-line by adult males over 30 years of age.

• Teenage girls are more prone to make nude videos or pictures of themselves and store it on computers with viruses and hackers which are easily accessible and posted on websites for exploitation.

• Going to sites like YouTube, according to a privacy group, teenage girls post sexually explicit striptease dances for people to view and according to YouTube over 300,000 videos have been removed because many of these girls were found to be between 12-16 years of age.

Protecting our children from all dangers is of utmost importance and with the increasing use of online connections, having a software package or a computer that adds an extra layer of protection is just what the doctor ordered - computer safety, we all need it indeed.

For more information about TANKOH and their products, please visit www.TANKOH.com.