Family Tech Blog

Tag: blog

  • How YOU Can Keep the FamilyTechBlog Alive

    How YOU Can Keep the FamilyTechBlog Alive

    We are not at risk of shutting down. We do, however, have hopes of becoming more and more affective in reaching families with the latest internet safety and family tech news. We are writing several articles a week and producing podcasts, tutorial videos, and other resources for you to use as tools to keep your family safe online. Offline we also reach out to schools, police departments, churches, and other organizations with internet safety workshops. We often don’t charge for these workshops because the groups we are working with wouldn’t be able to have us in if we did. This means our greatest resource is you, our reader/viewer/listener.

    There are several ways to support this blog. The easiest and most helpful to you is to use one of our affiliates. Accountable2You is a great accountability software resource, NetNanny is a filter that we recommend, and MobiCip is another, affordable, filtering and reporting option. Another way to help us out while helping yourself is to buy our book, “What’s in Your Pocket? A parent’s guide to protecting your children online.” The book is only $10.50 from this site and we’ll ship it the day you order it. It’ll really help us out while giving you the confidence and knowledge you need to protect your kids online. Finally, you can partner with us directly through a couple of ways, fist of all is Patreon. Patreon.com/becausefamily is where you can sign up to support our blog and podcast and be listed as a partner in the credits of our video and audio resources. You can also donate a special gift using Square or Paypal. Sharing our articles is also a wonderful way to show your support. Help us spread the word.

    Our vision is to reach as many families as we can with informative and relevant information to keep them up to date on the digital world their kids are growing up in. This blog and the podcast is and always will be free to the reader and listener but it isn’t free to produce. Your gift and the use of our affiliate links keep us writing and recording so that you and the parents you know can have more tools that you can use to keep your families safe.

    Thanks for your partnership and for putting up with this plea for support…now to your regularly scheduled tech safety information.

  • Tumblr App Installs “Adult Content On Switch”

    Tumblr App Installs “Adult Content On Switch”

    Tumblr has lost some traction over recent years. It’s not so much a social media platform as a blog host and not really even that. It’s more used for GIF (animated images) posting than anything nowadays. Apple has always had a pretty strict standard on adult content in the apps in their app store. They require developers to have adult content disabled by default. This usually means that image searches on your browser should be without any blatant pornography unless your search is specifically for that. Tumblr has updated their iOS app with a workaround for this rule. There is now a switch that will allow users to turn adult content back on in Tumblr. It’s actually a “safesearch switch” and it’s set to on by default, thus following the rules set up by Apple. All it takes, however, is for someone to go to the settings page of the app and turn the safesearch option off. This will unleash the cacophony of adult content that is available on Tumblr (many say that pornographic images and gifs have become it’s main purpose) on the user.

    What Parents Should Know

    The Tumblr app is basically a browser in which anyone with an account can see any of the user generated blog content posted on the site. As mentioned above, the app has become inundated with adult content and is not safe for anyone you’d like to keep from those sort of images or videos. The safe search switch isn’t located in the restrictions settings on your iPhone. It is just in the settings for the app. This means safesearch changes can be made without a password. This app is an easy way for your child who has been looking at inappropriate images or videos to access more of that. Now that the safesearch can be turned off, you’ll want to add this app to the uninstall list.

    Our children can be greatly harmed by pornography. Studies are showing it’s addictive nature and the ability it has to alter a person’s sexuality and preferences, creating what they call an “arousal template.” This causes kids to be attracted only what they’ve seen online and can create serious problems for them in the future. They also say that kids who view pornography are six times more likely to force others into sexual behavior. Many in our culture view online adult content as only entertainment but it’s being proven that it’s detrimental to the mental health of our kids. If there is anything you can do to protect your children from adult online content, you must take steps to do so. Uninstalling Tumblr just became one of those steps.