Web the 'new playground for kids'

2012-06-27 13:55

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Pretoria - The worldwide web, with all its hazards, is the new playground for children, a Google SA official said on Wednesday.

"Like in any playground, you don't abandon your children, but supervise and check how they are playing there," the search engine's public policy manager Fortune Sibanda told a conference on child abuse in Pretoria.

He urged guardians to take stringent steps to protect children from negative content on the internet.

Minors had novel ways of searching for and accessing websites from which they were prohibited.

Sibanda said Google SA, working with concerned parties and the government, had embarked on a major drive to educate South Africans on internet safety.

"We need to be careful of the places where we 'check-in' on social networks. It is not safe for one to be announcing online that I am now in Pretoria, I am now at the CSIR. That information can be dangerous."

The three-day conference, which ended on Wednesday, was hosted by the SA Professional Society on the Abuse of Children at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) convention centre east of Pretoria.

- SAPA