Personal Safety
At home, at the office, or scrolling through a mobile device, we reap the benefits of the Internet in thousands of ways, yet most users don’t give a second thought to how their actions online can affect their personal safety offline.
This wasn’t much of a problem even five years ago before the widespread use of the Web as a social tool. But with e-commerce, social networking, texting, blogging, instant messaging, and the pervasive use of video, the impact of online content on physical and emotional safety is now a top concern for parents, law enforcement, schools and even corporate and non-profit leaders. You do not have to look far to find recent examples illustrating it is becoming easier to engage in that next level of contact that takes users from the cyber world to the physical world.
It's important that users set their pages to private, install anti-phishing software and ignore spam solicitations for personal information. But these actions are not sufficient to address the more subtle ways of making contact with users or gleaning information from them, and the result is that people are often overconfident in their ability to protect themselves.
Helping users understand that the information they casually share may mean they are no longer anonymous is critical to their physical and emotional safety. Predators of all types – whether they are emotional, financial, physical or reputational predators - search for online users who they believe will be vulnerable to their exploitation. They look for information which might give them physical addresses, car make and models, school enrollment or travel plans. Individuals, families, schools, and organizations have a right to safer online infrastructure and enforcement against bad actors who use the Internet to undermine personal safety.
This website is designed to help you get started learning about how online risks occur, what you can do to significantly reduce your chances of falling victim to online abuse, and what you can do in the event a crime or abuse occurs.