A specialist at Switchboard 111 gives advice to children. — VNA/VNS Photo

Personal information of children is widely shared on social networks and is easily accessible, so protecting children's interactions in cyberspace requires the participation of the whole society, and parents most of all.

P, a 14-year old girl from Bắc Giang Province, earlier this year received a phone call from a stranger who introduced himself as staff of an entertainment company.

Initially, P was asked to join a game of word guessing with rewards of lipsticks. Later, the man asked her to transfer money to his bank account and threatened to post her sensitive information if she did not obey him.

P was scared at first but then she became suspicious so she called the national child protection hotline 111 (Switchboard 111) for advice.

Luckily, nothing unfortunate happened to P.

From P's story, it can be seen that the leak of personal information, including the names of schools, family members and friends can come from many sources, especially from sharing information on social networks.

“Research by Switchboard 111 showed that fraudsters study victims very carefully through previous information collection,” said Nguyễn Thị Nga, deputy director of Children's Department of Ministry of Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs.

“When calling or chatting with the victims, the subjects understood the victim's psychology in order to talk and gradually seduce them into a scam,” said Nga.

Recently, there have been instances of scammers phoning parents to inform them that their children had an emergency and are at the hospital, and the parents need to transfer money to the doctor for urgent surgery, Nga said.

These cases take advantage of children to commit fraud, but the problem is how the scammers got the children's information to call their parents, Nga said.

This is partly due to parents sharing children’s information such as certificates of merit, study transcripts or pictures on social networks, she said.

Regarding the collection of children's data, Định Thị Như Hoa from the Department of Information Security of the Ministry of Information and Communications said: “Every year at the end of the school year, parents post their children's study results or certificates of merit on their Facebook pages without covering their personal information, which is a way for crooks to commit fraud."

“The other reason for information disclosure is that there are many websites that collect personal information but do not have commitments with third parties, leading to disclosure by data managers themselves or by third parties,” Hoa said.

“Or parents have inadvertently entered personal information on fraudulent websites,” she added.

According to Bùi Duy Thành, an expert of World Vision Việt Nam, the act of stealing children's personal information is only the first step. The scammers will then take advantage of the obtained information to continue to abuse and bully the children.

Đỗ Dương Hiển from Childfund Việt Nam said that during the process of conducting evaluation surveys, there is clear evidence of the psychological effects of children being exposed to inappropriate information.

There are data showing that 20 per cent of children have feelings of fear and disgust when watching videos of violence and sexual behaviour within one month after accessing the information, Hiển said.

According to an international report in 2022, there were one million reports of technology companies from Việt Nam related to images of child sexual abuse online, an increase of 20 per cent compared to 2021, Hiển said.

And many child abuse images were uploaded by users in Việt Nam, he added.

From the angle of businesses, Nguyễn Anh Vũ, general director of Cốc Cốc search platform, said that fraud mechanisms focus on the human factor. The scammers create trust for the person being scammed to do as requested.

A new trick recently is that scammers use children's information to scam and earn money from their parents, Vũ said.

Scammers focus on the easiest channels of phone, SMS or social networks, he said.

“Children's information in particular and personal information in general shared online is very accessible. It is easy to find keywords ‘buy student data’ by phone,” warned Vũ.

Children are engaging more and more on the cyberspace. — VNA/VNS Photo

Parents' information security awareness needs to be enhanced

Regarding the issue of protecting children on cyberspace, Hoa said that the most common mistake made by parents is to think that pornography is only available on pornographic websites.

But in reality, this content is everywhere and easily accessible by children, Hoa said.

Twenty three per cent of children accidentally see online sensitive images or videos that might be from advertising or social media, or online comments containing pornographic website links, Hoa said.

Therefore, blocking pornographic websites is not enough and ineffective to protecting children in cyberspace. It is necessary to use a more powerful and effective tool with the ability to block and filter any website at any time, she said.

“Current tools are effective in image and text processing. However, video processing requires complex technology. At present, there are almost no tools of filtering and blocking for video, especially for browsers and applications,” she said.

“Thus, parents need to let children watch videos only from reputable sources, like YouTube Kids, as well as use filtering tools to protect children as much as possible,” she said.

According to Hoa, currently, the average age of children owning a mobile phone is nine while the average age of children discussing cyberspace safety is 13, so there is a gap in awareness, knowledge and skills for children protecting themselves.

Vũ said: “At present, search platforms have also developed tools to protect users such as the ability to safely search to filter out inappropriate content, updating users about fraudulent and malicious websites. We plan to launch a separate browser for kids. But the last and most important factor is that parents must pay attention to what their children do online,” Vũ said.

“Children under 13 should not use social media and parents must watch children under 16 when surfing online,” he said. “Parents also need to have rules to help their children explore the Internet, but also need to ensure safety."

According to Nga, the legal system in Việt Nam has regulations on children's privacy and confidentiality.

The regulations need to be translated into knowledge and skills for children and parents, Nga said.

Prevention is most important. It is very necessary for parents to pay attention to their children in cyberspace, she said.

“Parents and teachers must always be with children to avoid them being deceived into revealing information online," she said.

Recently, the Ministry of Information and Communications has added regulations on handling violations of personal information collection with fines up to VNĐ60 million (US$2,600).

Trần Quang Đạt, director of the Department of Education and Student Affairs of the Ministry of Education and Training, said that since 2018, informatics is a compulsory subject.

However, the duration of the course is limited and provides only basic knowledge. The prevention of toxic information is only briefly taught.

The ministry is planning to organise forums to train skills to handle toxic problems in cyberspace, he said.

In the first four months this year, calls to Switchboard 111 related to school violence increased by 11 per cent compared to the same period last year. Statistics based on police cases showed that the trend of child abuse in 2023 increased compared to 2022.

The situation of children being abused in the cyberspace is still complicated.

The acts and consequences of violating children's rights in general and child abuse in particular in the online environment have been affecting children in the short and long term, especially related to psychological, emotional, moral and mental health issues. — VNS