Dangers Of The Online Playground

Abstract

Internet online chat has become a part of our social environment and can offer many wonderful opportunities for new friendships and for keeping in touch with those who are already friends. There are a huge number of chat providers such as MSN, Yahoo, IM and TxtChat. Chat has become one of the big three net applications, along with web surfing and e-mail. Chatrooms are booming in popularity particularly among children and teenagers. It has become one huge playground just like any swing-park. But chat also has very real risks especially for children. Therefore children, teenagers, parents and other institutions need to be made more aware of the dangers that exist. The paper highlights the dangers internet chatrooms pose to children and investigates what can be done to ensure that people are made more aware of the risks online. This would help ensure that children could take more advantage of chatrooms and continue to enjoy their time online.

This image was selected as a picture of the week o...

Internet!

English: Screenshot of Chat Rooms in Paltalk Scene

1 Introduction

Due to the growth of web services such as Yahoo, MSN and many others there has been a sudden pep up to get every adult, teenager and child online. Web sites gives us the chance to listen to and download music, read newspapers, visit other countries, follow up on hobbies, tour museums and much, much more. Although in general the web is an exciting and tremendous resource, there are many areas that may harm the children users online or may damage the values and standards that parents may want to apply to their children's maturation. Therefore in this paper we have decided to focus on the dangers of chatrooms to children.

In the next section, we highlighted the possible dangers that exist in the online chatrooms followed by some statistics in Section 3. Then in Section 4, we described the...