In July, NetSafe farewelled Jess Pettersen and welcomed Jani Rayner to the Contact Centre team. Read on to take a look at a few of the queries Contact Centre staff have fielded recently.
NetSafe Contact Centre staff regularly deal with a wide range of queries related to the online environment, and ICT (Information and Communication Technology).
Some recent queries have included:
•
Fake suicides on Social Networking Sites
We received two separate queries where people underwent the traumatic experience of losing a close online friend to suicide, only to find out later that the friend never existed. The loss for people in this situation can feel totally real, and the betrayal of trust can be overwhelming. Several of the young people involved in these cases then became suicidal themselves requiring specialist support.
Click here to see a 60 minutes clip on similar cases.
• Ex-staff member hacks into website
A company discovered that someone had logged onto their website – using the correct username and password – and changed the settings so that orders weren’t being received (potentially costing the company hundreds of dollars). They suspected a staff member who was recently dismissed, but because everyone had shared a logon, they were unable to prove who was responsible.
• Advice on where to report child pornography
We received several queries from people seeking advice on reporting pornographic images containing children. Images that appear to come from NZ (i.e., a .nz website address) can be reported to the Department of Internal Affairs (DIA,
www.dia.govt.nz), and images that come from outside NZ can be reported to the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF). It’s important that people do not send the material onto others for their opinion, as this could be considered as distribution of objectionable material, under NZ law.
• Schools ask about parental consent to post students’ images and work online
Several schools have asked us about guidelines for posting images of students and their work online. NetSafe can provide a parental consent template to any school, which emphasises the internet as a ‘global information system’, to ensure that parents are giving informed consent. Schools who wish to post school newsletters online should look at them closely, as they often contain a lot of information which can be used to identify individual children.
• Are internet cafés safe?
Internet cafés can be very convenient, especially when traveling, but there is simply no way of knowing if they are safe (i.e., free of malware), so our advice is to avoid using them for anything private, e.g., internet banking, email, etc. Setting up phone banking, or automatic payments, can limit the need to use these services while away. Taking a laptop can help too, but people need to be careful when using wireless hotspots, that they are legitimate and secure.
