The seventh grader looks desperate as she approaches. She’s just been to a cybersecurity talk at her school, where she raised her hand when asked if she has a social media account – Snapchat, in her case.
Most students at Chicago’s Nathan Hale Elementary School, many of them younger than the required social media age of 13, did the same when retired police detective Rich Wistocki inquired about Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat or any other number of applications and games.
“Please, please, pleeeeease, don’t use my picture or a video of me raising my hand,” this particular kid begs repeatedly, despite assurances that she was not caught on camera.
She is pleading because her parents don’t know she is on social media, the gateway to the secret digital lives many of today’s teens are living – and that, for a good number, might also include:
Using video and chat functions to meet strangers;
Storing and sending risqué photos;
Using Text Burner and other apps to harass and bully peers anonymously;
Using apps that secretly record messages on Snapchat and other apps;
Ordering drugs via any number of social media and communication apps or encrypted websites – or buying something else online that you don’t want them to have;
Buying or borrowing “burner” phones to avoid parental monitoring or when phone privileges are lost.
And giving their significant others or friends the password to social media accounts so they can “manage” their accounts when their phones are taken away.
How are they getting away with this in 2018? In a world where the words “cyberbullying” and “predator” have been etched on the collective parental psyche for some time? Well, for one, devices have gotten smaller and the kids receiving them – phones, tablets and iPods – are getting younger and, thus, savvier sooner.
Many parents are just plain overwhelmed – and often far too trusting, said Wistocki, now a cybersecurity consultant whose packed schedule has him crisscrossing the country to speak to parents and young people since he retired from the police department in Naperville, Ill.
During those talks, he holds up a mobile phone and regularly tells wide-eyed parents:
“When you give this kid, at the ripe old age of 11, this ominous device, it’s like giving them the keys to their brand new Mercedes and saying, ‘Sweetheart you can go to Vegas. You can drive to Texas, Florida, New York, wherever you want to go …” And with wi-fi, device doesn’t just mean a phone, but also tablets and iPods.
Kathleen Kazupski, a mom with two daughters, ages 13 and 17, hung on Wistocki’s every word.
“As parents, we need to wake up, no doubt,” she said after the talk. She came, in part, because she discovered last year that her younger daughter was messaging with a boy she didn’t know, until mom put an end to it. “I scared the hell out of her.”
Jennea Bivens, another parent who attended, uses an app called MMGuardian to manage and monitor her 13-year-old daughter’s phone use. She shuts it down during the school day, though her daughter can call her, and at bedtime. She turns off certain apps, sometimes as punishment, and monitors texts. To monitor most social media, though, she must either be on her daughter’s phone, or check the accounts she knows exists from her own social media, most recently getting after her daughter for cussing on some of her video posts. “It’s a full-time job,” Bivens concedes.
A 2016 survey from the Pew Research Center found that, back then, about half of parents said they had checked their children’s phone calls and text messages. But they were less likely to use tech-based tools to monitor, block or track their teens.
Since then, built-in parental restrictions, including screen time limits and app blocking, have been added all the time for Google’s Android via its Family Link.
Tech experts agree that monitoring makes sense for younger kids. But Pam Wisniewski, an assistant professor in the department of computer science at the University of Central Florida, is among those who suggest a gradual loosening of the strings as teens prove they can be trusted.