More than 70 percent of teens hide their online behavior from their parents, according to a June 2012 survey conducted by McAfee. If you think you know what activities your teenager is up to on the Internet, then you would better look carefully.
According to Yahoo Tech, less than one in five parents are aware that their teens are viewing porn, uploading racy photos, or chatting with total strangers. Messaging, photo sharing, and dating apps you've probably never heard of are the things to be aware of on the Internet.
Apart from Facebook, here are five of the most troubling Web and mobile apps your teens may be using:
This alternative texting service let your teens chat and swap pictures while bypassing your wireless provider's SMS service. So checking your child's normal texting history for signs of misbehavior will not do you any good.
Kik's terms of service ban pornography and nudity, but a search for "kik nudes" offers copious exceptions to these rules, Yahoo Tech reported. Even though Kik offers a guide for parents, it requires you to take your child's smartphone away and launch the app to see it for yourself.
Other popular alternatext apps include WhatsApp, TextNow, and Viber.
Every day, some 400 million photos are shared via Snapchat. Those photos then disappear, as Snapchat has them automatically self-destruct in ten seconds or less, Yahoo Tech reported.
The only problem is that the apps let others capture those supposedly temporary images. Those pictures are then posted online and are widely available. Snapchat recently began offering a "Stories" feature that lets photos survive for up to 24 hours - offering even more opportunities to save images.
For the most part, Vine serves up endlessly looping six-second videos of cute pets and teens mugging for their smartphone cameras. But it also shows the creativity of those six seconds when it comes to porn.
Following an uproar about naked naughty bits when it launched last January, Vine Labs removed the ability to search for adult hashtags like #XXX or #NSFW, but the videos are still there. Worse, anyone can search for teens, follow them, log their locations, leave comments, and try to connect with them via other services, according to Yahoo Tech.
This groundbreaking site lets anyone engage in video chat via webcam with random strangers. Users under 18 are prohibited, as is nudity, but nobody's checking IDs.
And if you do get kicked out for violating those terms, there are lookalike services like Omegle, ChatRandom, or DirtyRoulette with even fewer restrictions.
Hookup apps like Tinder let you scroll through images of other members and flag the ones you like. If they also like you, you're both notified, and then you can contact each other and do what comes naturally.
The only scary problem is that Tinder's minimum age for services is 13.
What could be the solution then? The only way to stop your kids from getting into trouble on these tricky apps is to activate parental controls on their devices to keep them from installing apps without your approval, or make sure all app purchases go through your account, not theirs, Yahoo Tech reported.
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