In our increasingly wired world, sometimes we run into really nasty things in cyberspace through no fault of our own. I had one of those experiences over the weekend. And it happened at my local YMCA of all places.
I was pedaling away on a recumbent stationary bike while my wife jogged on a treadmill behind me. Generally speaking, I like to read while I “bike,” and I had our Kindle Fire with me for that purpose. The Y has a public Wi-Fi network, so I had logged on to surf a bit.
I’d been skimming through websites I visit regularly when something very disturbing happened. I was several pages into one of my favorite guitar-oriented sites when I hit the back button to return to its homepage. I looked up for a minute as the page loaded, but when I glanced back at the screen, it was not the site I’d been on at all. Instead, it was a pornographic website.
I was horrified on multiple levels—not the least of which was wondering if anyone else might have noticed the lewd images on my Kindle’s screen before I did and wondering why this guy was looking at porn at the Y. I quickly closed the page and tried to figure out how on earth I had ended up where I was.
The answer is this: I’m not sure how it happened. What I do know is that I hadn’t done any of the things that might typically and inadvertently lead to such a site, such as mistyping a web address or clicking an unfamiliar link. I’m also certain that it had nothing to do with the guitar site I was on, as a big portion of it is devoted to musicians playing praise and worship music.
As far as I can discern, then, it was a simply a glitch (or, perhaps more likely, a hack): One minute I’m navigating a website I’m very familiar with, the next I’m somewhere decidedly different. Even looking at the history on my Kindle’s browser, it still showed a picture of the guitar website itself while the porn site’s web address was underneath. Clearly something out of the ordinary had happened.
I think there are a few lessons to be learned here.
First of all, through no fault or intent or mistake of my own (as far as I can tell), I ended up someplace exceedingly seedy. It’s a reminder that even when we’re not wandering anywhere close to vile stuff online, it might—somehow—end up on our screen anyway.
Second, I think it’s an opportunity to remember that we probably should be even more digitally vigilant when we’re surfing public networks, as more and more of us are doing these days with mobile devices. I don’t know exactly what happened in this case, but there’s little question that all of our devices are more vulnerable on these public networks than we are at home.
Third, many (if not most) of us have likely installed some kind of content security and parental controls on our main computers at home. But have we exercised the same vigilance with all of our mobile devices? This event served as a jarring catalyst for me to explore our Kindle Fire’s parental controls more thoroughly.
Finally, this incident illustrates that no matter how well we coach our children and no matter how many boundaries we put in place to protect them, they may still encounter material like this online through no fault of their own. In such cases, it’s critical that we’ve talked with our kids ahead of time (in age-appropriate ways) about what to do if they end up on a strange website. And they also need to know it’s always OK to talk to us after the fact if they’ve encountered something that they weren’t looking for but stumbled upon anyway.
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