School is back in session, which means kids are spending more time online — for homework, social media, and connecting with friends. But the start of a new school year also brings renewed risks: strangers in group chats, unsafe links shared by classmates, and increased screen time that many parents struggle to monitor effectively. The …
Instagram is rolling out a new safety feature that notifies parents when their teenagers repeatedly search for suicide or self-harm content. The feature, arriving next week in the US, UK, Australia, and Canada, represents a significant shift in how Meta approaches child safety online. Here is how it works. Teens enrolled in Instagram’s “Teen Accounts” …
Online grooming remains one of the most underrecognized threats facing children and teens today. Unlike the stereotypical “stranger danger” narrative, grooming is a slow, calculated process where predators systematically build trust, create emotional bonds, and gradually desensitize young victims to exploitation. Research from the Crimes Against Children Research Center and the National Center for Missing …
As students head back to school this fall, there is a new threat parents need to know about: AI-powered nudify apps. These tools use generative AI to create fake nude images from ordinary, fully clothed photos — and they are being used to target teens in schools across the country. The National Center for Missing …
Online sextortion is not a rare crime anymore. It is a crisis. New research from the Cyberbullying Research Center, published in the May 2026 issue of Child Abuse & Neglect, finds that 15.4% of U.S. teens aged 13 to 17 have experienced sextortion. That is triple the rate from just five years earlier. Even more …
Conversational AI chatbots are exploding in popularity among teens — and so are the risks. A new nationally representative study published in the Journal of Adolescence found that 60% of US teens ages 13 to 17 have used a conversational AI chatbot at least once. More alarming: of those teen users, nearly half (46.8%) reported …
Online grooming remains one of the most serious threats children face in digital spaces. Predators use calculated methods to build trust, create secrecy, and gradually lower a child’s defenses — often right under a parent’s nose. Understanding how the grooming process works is the first step toward preventing it. Groomers commonly follow a pattern: they …
Teq’s iBlocks Earns iKeepSafe COPPA Safe Harbor and FERPA Certifications September 24, 2024—iKeepSafe is pleased to announce that iBlocks (www.iBlocks.com, a Teq product) has earned the iKeepSafe COPPA Safe Harbor and FERPA Certifications. These certifications signify that iBlocks has been proactively and independently assessed by iKeepSafe, an experienced privacy protection organization. iKeepSafe Privacy Certifications simplify …
Stay Safe Online – Related Links Here are helpful links from the National Cybersecurity Alliance’s sponsors, partners and friends to help you and your friends and family be safer and more secure online. AARP Fraud Watch Network The AARP Fraud Watch Network provides online safety and identity resources, help for victims of fraud or scams, …
Adolescent Digital Self-Harm Over Time: Prevalence and Perspectives Digital self-harm, the anonymous online posting, sending, or otherwise sharing of hurtful content about oneself, has not received the same amount of scholarly scrutiny as other forms of self-directed abuse. In the current paper, we analyze three independent national surveys of U.S. teens (aged 13–17, M = …