Digital Parenting Tricks: What should you do if your child is asked for a home address?

Advise your children to avoid giving out their home address in online conversations or in posts, comments, geolocation, etc.

Social media apps such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, etc. allow users the option of revealing the exact location of their house. It doesn’t require a great deal of effort for someone to match all pieces of information and get your full address. Imagine posting a photo with your family going on holiday – it’s like advertising that your home will be empty during that period.

Talk to your children about who should know their home address or who shouldn’t. For example, they are allowed to give it when calling emergency services, but posting it online is dangerous.

Make sure they understand it is important they never share your home address, city or even state to anyone online.

Teach them to call you and ask for your advice/consent whenever they have to fill in a form online that requiring personal details.

This article is part of the Digital Parenting Tricks series for the Bitdefender Parental Control* feature. Bitdefender worked with a psychologist to create a cheat sheet for parents and offer them some guidance on how to deal with some of the most troublesome digital challenges of our time. Because we want to use technology to find new ways to stand up to this kind of behaviour.

*The Detection of Cyberbullying and Online Predators functionality is no longer available in Bitdefender products.