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The Internet opens many doors and makes it much easier to communicate with others. Many children, often from an early age, have social media accounts that allow them to communicate with people from all over the world, including people they meet through online games. For some these experiences are positive, for others anything but. This is how you can create a more secure internet experience – for example by using a VPN.
Private accounts and smart filters
June 17 is Anti-Cyberbully Day, which draws attention to victims of online bullying and intimidation. Tips are also given on how to avoid being bothered by bullies online as much as possible. If you want to be more careful with social media, locking your accounts is a first step to consider. This way you prevent people you don’t fully trust from gaining access to everything you post, from TikTok to Instagram to Twitter. If you set your account to private, only the people you’ve given access to can see your photos, videos, and messages. Your profile photo, username and description are the only things left visible.
On TikTok and Instagram, tap your profile at the bottom right, then tap the menu button at the top right, go to ‘Settings’, select ‘privacy‘ and then turn on the ‘Private account’ feature. On Instagram, you also have the option to hide offensive words and message requests from people you don’t know under ‘Hidden Words’. The ‘Restrictions’ feature goes one step further and hides all unwanted comments and chat messages until you approve them yourself.
The security of a vpn
Another smart way to surf more safely and anonymously is to download a VPN (Virtual private network). Once connected, your IP address is virtually changed, making you appear to be a different person in a completely different location – even your ISP can’t see which websites you visit, so if you’re being harassed, no one can easily find out your location. A VPN is also very useful if you ever connect to public WiFi networks, it prevents malicious parties from gaining access to your online activities and passwords.
Also not bad: with a VPN your data is no longer exchanged directly with the public server or the server of your internet provider. Instead, internet traffic is routed to the VPN server via an encrypted tunnel. The VPN server provides encryption and then forwards the data to the public server or the ISP. With encryption, all data is coded. This means that only the sender and the intended end recipient can read this data. Even if, in exceptional cases, a hacker manages to intercept the data, it will become unreadable for the malicious party.