Preventing Online Sexual Predators and Online Child Crimes - Term Paper Example

The presence of naïve teenagers, adult predators, and the internet: a medium of connection creates the prefect recipe for child crimes. Every time a young child logs into a social networking website a discussion forum, a blogging forum, a messenger there are high chances of child predators being there at the same time waiting for communication or waiting to initiate a communication. The internet and emergence of allied web experience enhancing technologies built under the umbrella of advanced web technologies like forums, blogging sites, social networking websites, messengers, dynamic pages, etc have multiplied the opportunities for people interconnecting with one another and making their social and professional life prosper through a greater number of valuable contacts.

The dark side of the unrestrained growth and popularity of the internet and the web in general is the danger of misuse and criminals who are constantly misusing it to achieve their objectives. The days when the internet and the web were unknown pedophiles would frequent zoos, amusement parks, children's toy stores, etc to hunt children and trap them. The emergence of the internet and opened the doors to innumerable opportunities for these child predators to conduct their crimes online without even having to move.

Online privacy is a growing concern in the present technological scenario. Maintaining the confidentiality of one’s information that can identify a person individually, better known as identifiable information, is steadily getting harder. With the rise in security loopholes, counteracting hacking tools, techniques, and security breaches, the risk of inadvertent disclosure of one’s personal information and compromise of privacy simply skyrockets. The internet is a heterogeneous virtually existent medium of information exchange where possibilities are innumerable and access is unrestricted.

This freedom of access provided to users and subscribers from the world across without any discrimination or thorough background checks makes the internet an extremely vulnerable place to abusive people, child molesters, teenage predators, and other people with criminal intentions.