Thiruvananthapuram: It has been over two decades since Parry Aftab quit her job at Wall Street and emerged into an eminent cyber safety activist. This year when the US-based lawyer chose to pilot a campaign to make the internet safe for children in India, she chose Kerala also as a realm to work along with metro cities. On Tuesday, when she interacted with students of two city schools about their expectation on cyber safety, children told her that they are more concerned about being bullied over morphed images.
“Crimes using morphed images are typically popular in India whereas, in the US, children more often pass on their nude or near-nude picture online and get into trouble. The sextortion using an image can be prevented if we ensure our girls and boys keep their clothes on in all pictures shared on the net. However, what can we do if someone does it using their morphed picture? We need to make children and parents more aware of cyber safety,” said Ms Aftab who wants to hold awareness session for children in Kerala and five Indian cities.
In the longer run, she wants a nation-wide dedicated helpline for children to report cyber attacks they face. An application that will eliminate children’s access to undesirable content also is in the pipeline. “Keralites travel around and work more often in foreign countries. They buy expensive tablet phones for children, but they also have no time to keep a watch on their activities online. So we will do a survey among children as to what websites they want to view. Using an application, we can control undesirable contents,” she said.
She says she became more curious about Kerala, as inspector general, (Thiruvananthapuram Range) Manoj Abraham got introduced to her on Linkedin. She was informed about Kerala police’s Cyber Dome and magnitude of cyber crimes here before her visit. Ms Aftab’s organisation, Wired Safety, is a leading US-based child advocacy group. She sits on the safety advisory board of Facebook, Instagram and MTV and advises Interpol and FBI.
