Nigeria’s telecoms revolution has brought about growth in the number of subscribers. It has also led to flooding of the market with cheap internet-enabled mobile phones. Parents buy their kids mobile phones, iPads and other electronic devices, oblivious of what they do with them. LUCAS AJANAKU reports that some of these kids are either posting embarrassing messages and goofy self-portraits on Facebook or doing it on Instagram.
Thirty-four year-old Esther Daniel, mother of three, is a busy woman. She works with a private firm on Victoria Island and she lives in Egbeda, a Lagos suburb. Her husband is an Abuja-based civil servant while their three kids attend private schools in Abule-Odu. The eldest is a 10-year-old boy, who is in Junior Secondary School (JSS1).
With the increasing dangers of keeping housemaids at home, she felt the best way to stay in touch with her kids is to buy a mobile phone for the eldest so that she and her husband could monitor their movement to and from school. To complete the communication circle, mummy also buys airtime on the phone so that when the kids are in need of anything, they could call either her or their father.
She bought one of the cheap internet-enabled mobile phones for N2,500 for the boy. For long, the family stayed in touch happily and effortlessly.
One weekend when everybody was at home, Mrs Daniel picked her son’s mobile phone, opened the message inbox and was shocked by what she saw. As soon as she clicked on the web browser, what opened was his son’s Facebook page. “I was shocked to discover that my son already had about 1000 friends on Facebook. I took my time to read some of his chats and was dumbfounded. My worry is the time he has the opportunity to stay on the internet and engage in all these frivolous chats. I seized the phone and called his school teacher to complain that the school management was not doing enough in monitoring what the kids do. I was shocked to discover later that the teacher I called is also one of my son’s friends on Facebook,” she said.
The experience of Mrs Daniel is one out of many in the country. It is one of the many other sides of the telecoms revolution.
The number of popular social media sites available on kids’ mobile devices has exploded in recent years with the smartest applications (apps) now enabling kids to chat informally with select groups of friends with ease and without being monitored by parents, care-givers, coaches and college administrators, who are frequent Facebook posters also.
According to an online tech news platform, Balancing Act, many of these new mobile apps don’t require a cellphone or a credit card. There are free and can be used on popular portable devices such as the iPod Touch and Kindle Fire, as long as there’s a wireless internet connection.
A non-profit, non-partisan research organisation that provides free data and analysis on the social media, Pew Research Centre’s Internet and American Life Project, says more than three-fourths of American teenagers have a cellphone and use online social networking sites such as Facebook. But educators and kids say there is plenty of evidence to suggest that Facebook for teenagers has become a bit like a school-sanctioned programme – a necessary rite of passage with plenty of adult onlookers –while apps, such as Snapchat and Kik Messenger are the much cooler after-party.
Educators say they have seen kids use their mobile devices to circulate online videos of school drug searches to male students sharing nude pictures of their girlfriends. Most parents, they say, have no idea about this.
Head, Science Department, Jofem Comprehensive College, Egbeda, Lagos, George Akpan, said he used to consider himself fairly tech savvy because he is frequently on Facebook, but was shocked to learn that his kid brothers could message their friends with Samsung Galaxy. His uncle shuts their home’s Wi-Fi after 9 p.m, but laments his uncle’s attempt to keep tabs on the kids’ online activity is not yielding any dividends.
Mobile apps ‘refer to the software applications that can be downloaded to a mobile device through an online store such as Apple’s iTunes. According to the Federal Trade Commission, there are some 800,000 apps available through Apple and 700,000 apps on Google Play.’
According to Balancing Act, among the most popular mobile apps among kids is Instagram, free software that digitally enhances photos and posts them to user’s account online. The photos can be shared on other social media sites such as Facebook, which bought Instagram last year.
Then there’s Snapchat, among the top 10 free iPhone apps available. Coined by the media as the “sexting” app, Snapchat lets users send a text, photo or video that self-destructs within 10 seconds of being opened.
Kik Messenger also allows unlimited texting for free and offers anonymity to its users. Able to run on an iPod Touch or Kindle Fire, Kik allows vague user names – for example, a nickname or a string of random digits – that won’t reveal a person’s real name or phone number.
But as with anything online, each of these apps comes with serious caveats.
Snapchat, for example, acknowledges on its Web page that its messages aren’t guaranteed to disappear: Anyone receiving a text or photo can use their 10 seconds to capture a “screenshot,” or photo of their device’s screen, and save that image to their phone. Video also can be downloaded, although Snapchat says it alerts senders when their data is saved.
Instagram is considered pretty tame as long as kids adjust their privacy settings to limit who can see their photos and don’t post nudity, which could subject them to child pornography laws. But many parents, such as Mrs Daniel, don’t know their kids are on Instagram until there’s trouble – usually when kids post photos at parties, and other kids who aren’t invited see them.
A career guidance counsellor at Jofem Comprehensive College, Lagos, Mr Fab Olawole, said parents often would hand their kids a mobile device without understanding what they can do with it. He estimated that even without the latest social media app, the average secondary school student probably transmits some 150 texts a day.
“Some of the kids are so tech savvy that they explore areas where their parents never could imagined. A lot of them have fallen victims to cyber bullies while others have learned one bad habit or the other online.
“While it is good to allow the kids to have early access to technology as demonstrated by the availability of computers in the school, it is the duty of all care givers to monitor what their kids do at home. At school, the teachers do the best they can but you will agree with me that the bulk of the job is at home because that is where the kids have freedom-most of them have their rooms fully equipped, where they could do what they like when their parents are asleep,” he said.
Balancing Act reports that there are general security concerns too. A recent report by a cyberthreat research company, called F-Secure, found that some of the new social networking sites have become ripe targets for spreading malware and propagating scams.
It said in January, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in the United States (US) arrested a 27-year-old man in Los Angeles who allegedly hacked into hundreds of social media and email accounts, including Facebook and Skype, and found naked photos and personal passwords that women had stored online. He used the naked photos to try to coerce women into disrobing for him via Skype and threatened to post their private photos to their Facebook accounts if they refused to comply, according to the indictment.
Another important thing is that almost every mobile app available collects some kind of personal data, such as a person’s birth date or the location of their phones, and shares same information with third parties for marketing purposes. While a new regulation by the US Federal Trade Commission this year is aimed at keeping advertisers from tracking kids younger than 13, there is nothing near such regulation in Nigeria. Most social media apps require that a person promise to be at least 13 when they sign up, thereby exempting themselves from the tougher privacy restrictions.
President, Nigeria Internet Group (NIG), Bayo Banjo said the internet has become a huge platform for criminals who take advantage of the anonymity it provide to perpetrate criminal activities. He said parents should warn their kids against providing information to strangers.
He recalled that in years preceding the advent of the internet, parents always warned their kids against giving undue attention to strangers or people that are unknown to them. He urged parents to monitor what their kids do online.
Some experts have also recommended the use of filters and blockers that would limit the sites kids are exposed to.
