Don't let kids get into trouble online

Last week, a 3-yr-old girl in New Zealand managed to actually purchase an earth digger in an internet auction! This should teach you to take better care of your kids when you let them go online

Sometime on Saturday, I was watching a Sherlock Holmes movie on the History channel and eating an ice cream when my 20-month-old-nephew saw me. He looked at me with his eyes wide open and kept licking his lips for the delicious snack. His eyes, which looked like a Disney princess', managed to melt me in no time and before long he was eating my ice cream.

An hour later, he was snatching my dad's mobile from his elder brother and trying to play a game on the same. Kids! We let them get away with anything! But I got a shock of my life on Sunday, when I checked out a story on BBC which said that a mere child called Pipi Quinlan actually bought an earth mover online!

How it happened

The incident happened because Sarah Quinlan, the child's mother, had left the computer online when she was looking for toys for her daughter. She had unfortunately used settings that enabled her to log on automatically. When the child clicked on the link for the earth mover, the sale was registered.

It was only discovered the next day when the mother got an email telling her that she should pay 20,000 New Zealand dollars (Rs 583,400) to the owner of the earth mover. Obviously, the child thought that this was a toy earthmover and thankfully for the parents, the owner is not insisting that the sale should happen.

Any ideas?

While this is nothing more than a joke, parents should take some steps to prevent their young ones from accessing such sites. However, even site owners should do something about it. One quick idea could be what many sites use to determine if the user is a major for instance, one could ask the question 'Who is the current president of the US?' and only of the right selection is made should they proceed.

Of course, even kids know that Obama is the US president, which means that sites may have to come up with slightly tougher questions. One balancing act is that it should be easy for adults, difficult for children, and not irksome I don't want to play a game of Twenty Questions just because I am ordering pizza online!

QUICK TAKE
>>A three-year-old managed to order an earth digger online
>>It happened because the girl's mother had left auto login options on
>>Parents need to be more careful about such things

Three preventive tips
If you want to stop your little children from doing such things, here are some options:
>>Do not let children use our PC unsupervised
>>Many OSes let you lock the keyboard (On Windows XP, for instance, you can do this by pressing the Windows key along with the alphabet 'L'). Use this whenever you are moving away from the PC even for a few minutes
>>Do not use auto login options. It is painful to enter login and password details manually again and again, but it is a lot safer