Statistics show that people spend 45 percent more time online than they did before March 2020, including adults and children. But only 39 percent of parents say that they use parental controls to block, filter, and monitor their child’s online activity.
As many as 59 percent of teenagers say they have experienced some form of cyberbullying, while there are an estimated 500,000 online predators active each day. Children between the ages of 12 and 15 are especially susceptible to being groomed or manipulated on the internet.
VPN company Surfshark offers a digital privacy tool to mask internet activity. Using the age-old format of storytelling, they have adapted four beloved children’s books for the digital age.
Covering topics including personal data, identity theft, cyber security, and radicalization, the updated tales include a take on Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar, re-written as The Very Hungry Data Eater, to teach children about data safety online. Lewis Carroll’s 1865 novel Alice in Wonderland became Alice in Filterland to educate on cyber insecurity.
Surfshark told Newsweek: “Talking about these subjects early on will help your child understand potential dangers and also encourage them to chat with you about any concerns they may have when risks arise.”
In a world where nearly 6 in 10 parents say they’ll often text their kids to come down for dinner rather than calling for them, protecting kids from online dangers is becoming more important. Surfshark’s new stories help to make internet safety easy to digest.
“She posted a #beachlife selfie; she finally got some Likes, which felt rather odd because Alice was lonelier and sadder than ever before; so she posted the video of her crying by the control panel as well,” reads the story of Alice in Filterland that follows the iconic character as she receives an invite from @WhiteRabbit and tumbles into a world of influencers and Instagram filters.
In Where The Wrong Friends Are—a take on Maurice Sendak’s Where The Wild Things Are—Max turns to an online community when he is feeling unloved and misunderstood: “Some of the extreme ideas his new friends said frightened Max,” reads the story. “But they told him he was fierce and independent and made him a soldier among them.”
The updated versions of these childhood classics are available to download and read online for free and have been designed to be shared in an unusual way to bring digital literacy to young people.
