Six Things You Can Do RIGHT NOW to keep your kids safe online

And they're almost all free!

As promised, here’s the post I talked about from Monday. It was going to be FIVE things you can do right now to keep your kids safe online (for free or cheap) but it’s now actually six things! Because I liked one of the things too much not to share.

I genuinely hope you find it helpful. And here’s a refresher for why I’m doing this series: Your children are untrustworthy perverts. And now I’ll hand you over to Josh Drummond!

Hi, I'm Josh Drummond, and I'm a writer and researcher. That might not mean much in today's world – whomst among us is not a researcher these days? – so to distinguish myself from all the Some Guys out there I should provide a few more qualifying details. I'm a journalist (no, really: I have a degree and everything; this always surprises me far more than anyone else), I'm the co-founder of a software company, and I was a mentor for the amazing charity Pillars (Ka Pou Whakahou). I've also spent most of my career working in tech. My research skills have come in handy for everything from working for Spark-owned ISPs Bigpipe and Skinny Broadband, to tracking down obscure legal documents relating to Competitive Endurance Tickling for David Farrier's documentary Tickled. With all that, I've gotten pretty good at finding things online, and because internet research involves a lot of sorting through garbage, I've also learned how to not find stuff online.

That's the CV bit over.

I'm here to tell you that when it comes to online safety for kids, it's both worse and better than you probably think. Some good news first: Keeping kids safe online should not be expensive. No parent should ever have to shell out hundreds or thousands of dollars for a course on internet safety, and anyone who says otherwise is a grifter. Keeping kids safe online is mostly common sense, which is free. For those that need them, there are a few paid tech tools parents can use, which are mostly cheap.

All these tools and tips come with a vital prerequisite: talking to your kids. Yes, this is obvious, but most of the serious harms that befall children online (or offline!) occur because parents weren't in the loop. If you've got good, open, honest communication with your kid, you're much more likely to hear about something either before it happens, or soon enough afterwards that you can intervene effectively. This is why tactics like total tech bans simply don't work; your child will be both resentful and secretive, which is the worst possible combination when it comes to keeping them safe.

The alarmists aren't entirely wrong. Like most grifters, there is a grain of truth and wisdom at the centre of their pearl of bullshit, and there are absolutely real dangers online. But they're often not quite what parents think they are. We'll talk about that next time, but for now, here are a few tips you can take care of right away. Most cost absolutely nothing, assuming you've already got laptops and smartphones in the family. I've marked tips that might cost money with a $ so you can spot them.

6) Sort out your browser 

I hesitated to include this one because surely everyone knows about private browsing by now? But then I remember that I swim in a shitty tech sea on a daily basis, and a lot of people may not know about this helpful mode that will keep your smutty habits away from sticky kid fingers. It's easy to use private browsing on your devices: just search how. It is also possible to turn off private browsing on devices your children use: again, just search how to do so for specific devices. (Instructions and keyboard shortcuts for launching private browsing are different across devices and browsers, so do search for how to do it on your specific setup, but here’s the instructions for private browsing on Safari on an iPhone, and an Android device running Chrome.) 

Next, you’re going to need to switch your PC or Mac browser from Google Chrome, Safari or Microsoft Edge to Firefox. Firefox is, in my opinion, the best browser for most people: it has a comprehensive suite of privacy tools built-in. It has plenty of other useful tools that you should turn on by default, like ad blockers that prevent trackers from building a profile based on your every online move. Once you start browsing with an ad blocker on by default,  you'll wonder what you ever did without it.

Most importantly, Firefox has parental controls built-in, and a huge range of extensions that can block content from being accessed by young children. 

Here’s how to change browsers. 

5) Take advantage of the tools the tech companies do give you

Let's be clear: big tech companies are terrible. Facebook – sorry, Meta – sucks. Google sucks. Apple sucks. Obviously, Microsoft sucks. And Twitter, renamed X, sucks harder than a vacuum cleaner display store in a power surge. But over time, public pressure has forced the tech companies to make their products safer (although not yet safe enough) for kids. And a lot of the measures that will keep your kids safe will also help keep you safe, from things like hacking and identity theft. This Netsafe guide has some excellent ideas for locking down your social media apps.

Don’t forget the gaming consoles. Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo consoles also have a range of family safety options that can affect live chat, adding friends, the games that can be played, and how much children can spend in the console stores.

Shared space means easier supervision pals!

4) Turn off the WiFi at night and make sure laptops and devices are used in the lounge

That boxy thing the internet company gave you that makes the internet work at your place? That's called a router, and although it may seem like the home of forbidden dark magic, it's just an appliance that won't work if you turn the power off. If you don't depend on a constant connection for medical or other reasons, you can do so at your pleasure. Flick the switch at bedtime, and video nasties get exponentially harder for your kids to access. (Also, if my experience at Spark taught me anything, it's that turning your router off then on again is good for solving about 90 percent of customer connectivity problems. Do try it.) As for laptops in the lounge — this one is common sense, right? Until your kids reach a particular age, you can make sure all the computing gets done in a common area.

3) Monitor chat and insist on a “real friends only” rule

There's nothing wrong with kids talking to their friends online. The thing is to make sure they're actually talking to their friends online. The best way to do that is to make a rule that they can only chat online with kids they've already met in real life. Requests to add new friends can be done on a case by case basis, and there's an easy way to handle exceptions; if an unknown kid wants to make friends with your kid, they need to talk to you first. This isn't as invasive as it might sound – it's no different to knocking on the door of someone's house before being invited in for playtime.

If your kids use Messenger Kids you must approve each child your child wants to talk to. Have a chat to your kid about whether they really want to talk to that child. They might be being pressured to add them. You can always tell them that they can use the ‘my parents said no’ rule. You can decline or accept profiles of children your child knows from school on the parent dashboard of your Facebook app.

Use ‘Sleep Mode’ to turn your child’s device off at 4pm or whenever you feel they don’t need to use it anymore. And set it to ‘wake up’ at a time that suits you. Make use of the ability to read chats and remind your child that you can see what their friend’s are writing. Sit down and talk to your child about reporting and blocking. You can see if they’ve reported or blocked someone and you can have discussions about why they chose to do that.

Remember, you’re in control: you can log your child out of messenger at any time from any device you’re using. So do that, if the rules you’ve established as a family aren’t being followed.

When it comes to WhatsApp it’s important to remember that it is essentially a stealth chat app. Think 30 kids from the same class all in one chat group. Messages, photos, and videos can be deleted (unlike Messenger Kids). The other issue with WhatsApp is that a lot of adults use it. And there’s no way to pre-approve or decline who your child talks to. If you want your child to have a chat app so they can talk to their cousins or work on an assignment with classmates - Messenger Kids is generally considered safer. If you’re using WhatsApp, turn off location sharing on your phone settings (see instructions for iPhone and Android.)If you don’t, images your child shares will show the location of where the photo was taken. 

Every stock photo of children + computer is like the most terrifying image.

2) Filter the internet and put parental controls on devices

You can purchase specific parental filtering apps, but parents in New Zealand can also get filtering for free. Switch On Safety, which is the same filter that's used in New Zealand state schools, is available for parents to use. Click here and it will tell you exactly how to install it on whatever device you’re using.

 This New Zealand Government guide also has plenty of other excellent tips for locking down apps and devices for safety.

If your child has access to Google — set up safe search. It’s free.

You can also set up Restricted Mode on YouTube. For younger children, there’s YouTube Kids, which is exactly what it sounds like.  

If you have an iPad or iPhone, here’s how to set parental controls. There’s so much you can do - like removing access to apps and setting time limits and content restrictions. For Android smartphones, i.e. pretty much any smartphone that isn’t an iPhone, there’s also a comprehensive set of parental controls. 

A lot of kids have Chromebooks for school. They may already have some content controls in place, but if not, here’s how to set up parental controls on a Chromebook.

1) Ask your kids for tech tips

The most important piece of advice I could possibly give is talk to your kids about tech, and the best way to do this is to ask them for tips. Kids love teaching their parents, and you will learn more from asking them how they already do tech stuff, or what's going around the playground, than you ever would from reading guides from 40-something parents like me who are already, as much as I don't care to admit it, behind the times. Open and honest communication is the key to keeping kids safe online, or – more accurately – in the spaces where online intersects with offline. And that's what I'll be talking about more next time.

Oh, and: To make all of this easier, you can: 

Buy or resurrect a shitty smartphone for the kids to play on ($)

If you are like most people, you have had more than one smartphone. Yes, this is profligate and bad for the environment, but it's also the world we live in. Until we make the revolution, we are stuck with making lemonade from capitalist lemons. Anyway! What did you do with the old phone? There's a good chance it's in a drawer somewhere. Resurrect it, charge it up, and if it still works, reset it to factory settings (an internet search will tell you how). Yank the sim card, if it still has one, so it only works on WiFi. Install only the apps you want your kids to use, lock it down as per all of the above, and let them at it.

Or — Get the kids a "dumbphone" ($)

You want to be able to contact your kids – or for them to contact you – in an emergency, and that makes sense. But you don't want to give them a smartphone. That's also fine! If you've got the money for a smartphone, save some of it and buy the problematically-named alternative: a "dumbphone," which is actually pretty much just the phone you remember from being a teenager if you are as old as I am. They are leagues cheaper than a smartphone and they have all the buttons and features you need to send texts and make calls. Spark sells them, and so do other mobile phone companies. (Sadly, this probably doesn’t include your old Nokia 2280 — your beloved ancient phone may not remain compatible with modern network protocols.) 

This is just the first piece in our series on Keeping Kids Safe Online. You can read more of Josh’s work at the Bad Newsletter, where he writes about media, climate change, and David Seymour, and at the Cynic’s Guide to Self-Improvement, which is exactly what it says in the title. He’s also an amazing artist!