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Simfin

online safety and digital citizenship specialist

Parents/Carers News

26 January 2019

A study from researchers at the University of Vermont and the University of Adelaide found that access to as few as eight of our contacts is enough to enable predictive or machine learning technologies to achieve up to 95% accuracy in guessing what a person will post.

From an abstract of the study, titled “Information flow reveals prediction limits in online social activity” and published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour on Monday:

Information is so strongly embedded in a social network that, in principle, one can profile an individual from their available social ties even when the individual forgoes the platform completely.

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16 January 2019

The Children’s Commissioner for England, working with Tes and Schillings, have produced three teaching packs to help young people become more empowered digital citizens.

These packs include lesson ideas and simplified T&Cs for five major social media sites: Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, WhatsApp and YouTube.

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22 December 2018

Children as young as 14 are making thousands of pounds a week as part of a global hacking network built around the popular video game Fortnite.

About 20 hackers told the BBC they were stealing the private gaming accounts of players and reselling them online.

"The email said that my password had been changed and two-factor authentication had been added by someone else. It felt horrible," he recalled.

Two-factor authentication meant his account could only be accessed by entering a code sent to an email address or app registered by the perpetrator.

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You can learn how to use two factor authentication for Fortnite here

10 December 2018

A House of Commons committee has announced plans to investigate the growth of “immersive and addictive technologies”, to advise the government on how to create policy and regulation that can protect the public from the negative effects of digitisation and “gamification”.

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