Educating Youngsters About Cyber Violations

It is obvious that while the internet is aiding and helping our young generation grow, it is also making them vulnerable to a lot of cyber violations.

With networks like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Tumblr etc, just a click away, almost every minor these days has a social media account and are coming more in contact with unsupervised content.

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GeckoLife is another such social media platform, but with a child-safe approach.

Mr. Rajiv Gupta, the man behind the Singapore based start-up, says, "We are building a platform that advocates a safer, private and more meaningful social experience. With device ubiquity and age-ing down, we believe everyone's digital footprint is important, be it young and old. Further, we believe that social has an 'instant' nature with the platforms that exist today. We are attempting to build a platform that has better categorization and archiving ability."

GeckoLife claims to make social media "safer" in following ways:

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Register with a birth-date. If a person is under the age of 13 years, they will not be able to access the network. However, they can create an account under the supervision of their parents.

Unlike other platforms, if a newly registered member isn't connected to anyone, they can search people, but the members would appear 'private' in their profile.

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If someone tries to connect with a child, the parents would receive a notification, enabling them to control their child's connections.

Parent's approval would be required if the child wanted to connect with some shared space, pages or groups.

If my child is part of canvases, most are private, and no user other than participants within the canvas are a part of it.

Parent's approval would be required if the child wanted to upload some content.

Hence, with the adult supervision, which allows parents or guardians to control the audience and the content, the platform attempts to reduce the issues like cyber-bulling and poor digital citizenship.

Mr. Gupta, who has 15 years of experience in the Internet arena, expressed his views on the evolving social space, saying that "with only 10 years old, social media was still very early in its evolution and would definitely change. Social media has a significant utility element which I believe will be amplified in the future."

Source-ANI