When you’re out cruising the information superhighway, you’d better keep an eye out for street corner hustlers like cyber bullies, lurking computer viruses, pedophiles and identity thieves, according to Colonie Police Sgt. Ken Fuchs.
Fuchs leads Colonie’s computer crimes division, and on Thursday, Feb. 28, he gave a presentation to a dozen parents at Mohonasen High School on Internet safety.
I’m not out to scare people or portray the Internet as a bad place, said Fuchs. `The Internet makes life much easier and is an excellent tool, but it’s important to understand its potential dangers.`
Fuchs certainly has more knowledge of these potential dangers than the average cop. It’s his job to patrol the Web looking for child pornography on peer-to-peer, file-sharing sites and even pose as a 13-year-old girl in chat rooms in an attempt to bring charges against suspected pedophiles.
Fuchs said that, locally, parents and their teenage children seem to have a `this could never happen to me attitude,` but cases of regional arrests of sexual predators who entrap minors continue to make news. They are the kinds of cases he works on every day in the town of Colonie.
At Thursday’s presentation, Fuchs gave parents some of the tools he deemed essential in protecting children from potential predators.
The topics covered in the talk included common chat room lingo, illegal music and file downloads, the dangers of computer viruses and cyber-bullying.
According to Fuchs, cyber-bullying can be anything from the exchange of threatening e-mails to setting up fake pages on social networking sites that make fun of or degrade the bully’s target. Generally, the insults start out on the Internet but culminate in halls of schools as the information often travels to other classmates.
`With the morphing technology and programs like Photoshop that are out there, it’s very easy for kids to put someone’s head on a different body and post it on MySpace,` said Fuchs.
Mohonasen’s Student Resource Officer Tom Culbert said he has begun to notice an increase in cyber-bullying at the high school, but that school officials have been able to curtail any major incidents.
`We’ll get wind of some of the things that were said online because it escalates to the point where what was said comes through the front door into the schools,` said Culbert, who organized Fuchs’ talk. `What we try to do is mediate the situation and sort it out. So far, we’ve been pretty successful.`
While Fuch’s acknowledged that social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook can be the breeding ground for cyber-bullying, he also said that today’s teens are putting so much personal information on the Web that they could become the victims of identity theft, kidnapping, or sexual crimes.
‘There’s no reason a 15- or 16-year-old kid has to have a public page that anyone can access,` said Fuchs.
Fuchs said that with very basic search tools on Web mainstays like Google and AOL, predators could track down the hometown, age, school district, and online screen names of a potential victim with little more than the click of a mouse.
But, said Fuchs, those predators can only get the information if a child makes it available on sites like Xanga, MySpace or Facebook.
Despite the dangers of these social networking sites and others present, Fuchs said the most important thing for a parent to remember is to keep the avenues of communication open with children.
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