Keep These Apps Away From Your Child’s Phone
No matter how long you manage to contain them, at some point your children will have their own electronic devices, and they will use these devices to communicate with others. First with friends and family, but then with strangers.
Keeping our kids safe online is an important and ongoing part of keeping them safe, but parents also need to keep up to date with the latest apps they can use. Because even if we are not, there are predators.
As part of the so-called Operation Intercept , which aims to protect children from online predators and human trafficking, the Sarasota County Sheriff’s Office has begun compiling a list of apps parents need to know about.
The list began with nine applications last year and was updated in July to include six more, which, according to the sheriff, “are often downloaded by children and can be exploited by predators.”
They created this helpful parenting drawing detailing all 15 apps:
Here are the apps listed:
- Meet me
- Grindr
- Skout
- TEC So
- Badoo
- Bumble
- Snapchat
- Kik
- LiveMe
- Hall
- Whisper
- Ask.fm
- Calculator% (and many other calculator apps that hide photos, videos and other files)
- Hot or not
There are almost certainly more of them, but knowing which apps your kids are using and how they use them is an important part of keeping them safe from predators.