We are glad to announce the participation of Aradippou A’ Primary School students in a presentation with the title “Online Social Networks and Minor Users: Risks & Precautions” and an experiential workshop on interacting with “Cybersafety Family Advice Suite”(CFAS).
The event was co-funded by the CONCORDIA project (https://www.concordia-h2020.eu/) and Cybersafety II (https://www.cybersafety.cy/). More specifically, it was organized in the context of raising awareness and information about the risks related to the internet and online social media networks.
Cybersafety Family Advice Suite(CFAS) is a suite of cybersafety tools developed by our team that leverages the latest developments in security and privacy to design and implement a user-based web architecture to protect underage users from malicious users on online social networks. The CFAS user-centric architecture consists of three separate services, which can be combined to form an effective protection net against cyberbullying and sexual abuse. This network detects incidents of aggressive or malicious behavior, alerts users in the event of fraudulent and fake activity, alerts a user or parent in the event of sensitive content exposure, and protect the content of posts by recommending access directories, watermarking and securing content via cryptography or stereography.
Petros Papagiannis, Marcos Charalambous and Pantelitsa Leonidou; our postgraduate researchers visited Aradippou A’ Primary School on 19 & 23/06/2020.
During the presentation, our team explain to students and teachers the various risks and dangers; online social networks may encounter and provide some advice on how to handle those risks. Then the pilot tool(CFAS) was presented to explain its functionality and usefulness.
The experiential workshops were conducted through the execution of a series of scenarios performed by students in collaboration with postgraduate students using profiles on the social network Facebook or Twitter (created for the research purpose). Students during this session were able to interact with CFAS and get to know with latest technology cybersafety tools that can enhance their online safety during joining social media platforms.
The students and teachers showed engagement with the event. Several students showed interest to share their own experiences in online social media and their own risk coping mechanisms. Many of the students who participated in the experiential workshops showed willingness and interest in using CFAS tools.
We aspire to organize similar events to spread awareness of online social media risks and dangers and help minors to stay safe online by developing risk-coping techniques and mechanisms.
We are grateful to Mrs Margarita Hadjianastasi, the principal of Aradippou A’ Primary Scool for her support and excellent collaboration!
