Kaye Adams on Snap Maps:
“It was a spooky moment. I was at home in bonnie Scotland when Nadia called and asked where my eldest daughter was. I said she was away with friends, unsure of the exact address. “Well, I know where she is,” said Nadia, and reeled off
an address that sounded vaguely right. I thought she was going
a bit bonkers, but when I checked she was bang on. She knew exactly where Charly was - and I didn’t. That’s when I learned about Snap Map, an addition to Snapchat. Nadia’s daughter Maddie had located Charly to show Nadia how it works.
We were flabbergasted. It gave an exact, real-time location and even showed who she was with, and if the other people were also Snapchat friends. The possibilities for misuse started to run through our heads: a jealous boyfriend, a left-out friend, an older individual trying to stalk them. We put a video on our social media channel expressing our concern and got over 30 million hits.
Snapchat got in touch with us and we met with a senior executive who tried to reassure us that only ‘friends’ had access
to the information and only then if the user was not in ‘ghost mode’. If you select ghost mode, you remain under cover. When we asked whether these features had been trialled on the teenage brain, the executive from Snapchat admitted they had not. Yes, you can put it in ghost mode but you have to want to. And yes, you are only visible to friends, but the app allows you to have up to 2,500 ‘friends’ and, as we all know, the more ‘friends’ you have, the more popular you are. In teen world, popularity is everything. (You can now select which Snapchat friends can see your location.)
Snapchat isn’t the only platform that offers a ‘finding service’. The reality is that if you have a smartphone, you can probably be tracked. It might start out as a bad joke, a crush, or an infatuation, but the potential is there for it to turn into something sinister.”
Nadia Sawalha on sexting:
“Even though it turns me grey every time I do it, sexting is something my daughter Maddie and I often talk – ugh – frankly about. It seems one of the most common experiences of sexting for her girlfriends is to receive anonymous ‘dick pics’ (yes, I had the same shudder when I heard those words) in the form of direct messages.
When I plead with Maddie to help me understand why her friends don’t just have private accounts in order to avoid this modern day form of ashing, she says that many of her friends feel a sense of empowerment in being able to look and laugh. In fact, some girls see those visual ‘assaults’ (as I call them) as opportunities to turn the tables on those who send them.
Maddie tells me that she knows lots of girls who have sent nude images of themselves only to make the horrifying discovery that the boy they sent them to then passed them around his entire friendship group. One can only imagine the mortification this must cause these poor girls.
So, in a strange form of feminist revenge, some girls have taken to screenshotting these dick pics (which, on some platforms, informs the sender that a screenshot has been taken) and using them as leverage against the sender.
Of course, my husband and I would much rather friends of Maddie weren’t seeing these images at all and I have to confess,
I never cease to be amazed at how receiving a dick pic is often accompanied by laughter. It seems that a desensitization of what is right or wrong to see on your handset has already occurred, and so there is virtually no shock attached to seeing such abusive images.
In fact, the idea of female empowerment appears to be a huge part of sexting. The argument seems to be that the sender of nude photos, by ‘being in demand’ or ‘being in control’ of how they are seen on screen, is somehow in control of how they’re seen by their social group. These justifications of sexting or sending sexualized images are a grave cause for concern for any parent.”
Nadia, Kaye and Will are joining us for a webchat on Wednesday 25 July between 9 and 10pm to discuss these and other issues raised in their book Parent Alert!, including social media, chatting online, cyberbullying, gaming addiction and online shopping. Post your comments, experiences and questions for Nadia, Kaye and Will in the comments box below.
Parent Alert! How To Keep Your Kids Safe Online. By Nadia Sawalha, Kaye Adams and Will Geddes. DK, £15.99. DK.com