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Adults must impose the necessary checks and balances to keep children safe online, says the children's commissioner for Wales.

"All children and young people don't seem much of a distinction between their online and offline lives,"

Mr Towler told BBC Radio Wales. "It's all just one thing and they get really excited by the opportunities the internet affords and sometimes parents get a little scared about that and worried about what their children are accessing." 'Crossing the road' Continue reading the main story “Start Quote They're all running around with handheld computers these days, they're not just on phones ” End Quote Keith Towler Children's commissioner Mr Towler said he talks to children in lots of different settings and they "still enjoy playing outside as much as they ever did". He said we need to recognise that the internet provides fantastic opportunities for education and learning and its making sure that children access that safely. He said that was a real challenge for parents and carers. "It's a bit like crossing the road, you try to teach your children the best way of crossing the road well. We need to teach our children the best way of using this fantastic resource. "I think too many parents are very very scared of the internet and because they're so scared they will say 'Oh I don't understand it'". Handheld computers The commissioner also praised Hwb, the virtual learning environment, which he said provides protection for children using the web in schools. Mr Towler said: "We've got to get parents and carers to recognise that children do operate in the digital world. They're all running around with handheld computers these days, they're not just on phones. "They can access whatever they want whenever they want and parents need to engage on that. " "We need to remember that children and young people are much more savvy than sometimes we think they are, and they are much more responsible than sometimes adults think they are so its not all doom and gloom. "What we need to do is put the right checks and balances in place and what children always want from parents and carers is to understand what the boundaries are, and that's our job to do that." Sangeet Bhullar, executive director of Wise Kids, added that the digital landscape was "evolving rapidly" and up-to-date data was needed on how children and young people in Wales related to it. More on This Story .related-links-list li { position: relative; } .related-links-list .gvl3-icon { position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; } Related Stories Web safety lessons urged for infants 05 FEBRUARY 2013, EDUCATION &amp; FAMILY Online chat 'should be monitored' 22 JANUARY 2013, TECHNOLOGY Body to promote digital teaching 22 JUNE 2012, WALES $render("page-see-also","ID"); $render("page-newstracker","ID"); Related Internet links Children's Commissioner for Wales The BBC is not responsible for the content of external Internet sites $render("page-related-items","ID"); Share this pageShare this pageShareFacebookTwitter Email Print In association with $render("advert","advert-sponsor-module","page-bookmark-links"); $render("advert-post-script-load"); $render("advert-post-script-load"); More Wales stories RSS Army base shuts in defence shake-up An Army base in Pembrokeshire is to close with 600 troops transferred to St Athan in the Vale of Glamorgan. Soldiers' conman jailed three years Wales recall Warburton and Jones <!--

YouTube is the closest thing we have to a traditional TV model in online video.

YouTube is nothing like television, and everything like the internet.

too many videos on YouTube, and not enough ad dollars chasing them

Campaigners say Google are encouraging the poaching of elephants by running advertisements promoting ivory products.

more than 10,000 ads about ivory were running on Google's Japanese shopping site.

one of the world’s richest and successful technology companies with such incredible resources had taken no action to enforce their own policies

They may not be paying for the services directly, but customers still have a lot of power -- and companies know that they need to listen.

"We can't just sit back and allow the industry to just continue to ignore a core component of the user experience online," said Alex Fowler, Mozilla's global privacy and public policy leader.

The more devices that connect to the Internet, from smart cars to home thermostats, the more data there are about a person to collect.

Google raises privacy fears as personal details are released to app developers Campaigner says tech giant's policies don't make it clear that Google Play users who buy apps give over information

Charles Arthur guardian.co.uk, Monday 25 February 2013 14.39 GMT

Google Play: the personal details of app buyers are released to developers Google could face a third privacy row in a two years, after a leading campaigner called for the US government to investigate the fact that the names, geographic region and email addresses of people who buy apps from its Play store are passed on to the app developers without users' explicit permission.

February 8, 2013 12:30 pm Amazon unpacked By Sarah O’Connor The online giant is creating thousands of UK jobs, so why are some employees less than happy?

Between a sooty power station and a brown canal on the edge of a small English town, there is a building that seems as if it should be somewhere else. An enormous long blue box, it looks like a smear of summer sky on the damp industrial landscape. Inside, hundreds of people in orange vests are pushing trolleys around a space the size of nine football pitches, glancing down at the screens of their handheld satnav computers for directions on where to walk next and what to pick up when they get there. They do not dawdle – the devices in their hands are also measuring their productivity in real time. They might each walk between seven and 15 miles today. It is almost Christmas and the people working in this building, together with those in seven others like it across the country, are dispatching a truck filled with parcels every three minutes or so. Before they can go home at the end of their eight-hour shift, or go to the canteen for their 30-minute break, they must walk through a set of airport-style security scanners to prove they are not stealing anything. They also walk past a life-sized cardboard image of a cheery blonde woman in an orange vest. “This is the best job I have ever had!” says a speech bubble near her head.

If you could slice the world in half right here, you could read the history of this town called Rugeley in the layers. Below the ground are the shafts and tunnels of the coal mine that fed the power station and was once the local economy’s beating heart. Above the ground are the trolleys and computers of Amazon, the global online retailer that has taken its place. As online shopping explodes in Britain, helping to push traditional retailers such as HMV out of business, more and more jobs are moving from high-street shops into warehouses like this one. Under pressure from politicians and the public over its tax arrangements, Amazon has tried to stress how many jobs it is creating across the country at a time of economic malaise. The undisputed behemoth of the online retail world has invested more than £1bn in its UK operations and announced last year that it would open another three warehouses over the next two years and create 2,000 more permanent jobs. Amazon even had a quote from David Cameron, the prime minister, in its September press release. “This is great news, not only for those individuals who will find work, but for the UK economy,” he said.

Facebook Now Allows Friends To Promote Posts, But Privacy Concerns Arise

By Ian Kar | February 16, 2013 8:27 AM EST On average, Facebook posts are seen by approximately 16 percent of your friends; with Facebook’s newest feature, however, more of your friends may start seeing your best moments on the social network more often, because users can now pay to promote their friend’s posts.

Facebook hopes that with this new service, quality content supported by you and your friends will&nbsp; be featured at the top of your News Feed.&nbsp;Some users have already received the new feature, but the gradual rollout&nbsp;will continue with Facebook users with fewer than 5,000 total friends and subscribers.&nbsp;

rejected an international treaty to crack down on digital piracy, a vote that Internet freedom groups hailed as a victory for democracy but that media companies lamented as a setback for the creative industries.

European legislators

Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA, which has been signed by the United States, Japan, Canada, Australia, South Korea and a number of individual E.U. members.

The outrage over Instagram's announcement that it is changing its terms and conditions has turned the spotlight on the relationship between websites and users who upload content, whether it is photos, video, blogs or even games.

A survey of UK consumers suggested just 7% read online terms and conditions before they signed up for products and services, and other research has put it even lower.

Twitter: You retain your rights to any content you post on Twitter, but you grant the website a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence (with the right to sublicense) "to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute" your content.

The European Union&nbsp;is seeking&nbsp;to increase the private sphere of its citizens by strengthening data protection laws for the web. Large Internet firms and lobbyists are fighting the plans.

Gmail and Facebook may be forced to abandon their ad-supported models and start charging their customers in Europe or stop providing them with these popular services altogether.

Take Facebook, for example, which has its European headquarters in Ireland. The Irish government's data protection commissioner would then be responsible for the concerns of all EU citizens relating to the company's privacy policies.

Since there's no evidence these investors are interested in anything but profit, it's up to progressive organizations to become players in the global m

edia game.

generate huge revenues

"There are now signs that television news is increasingly vulnerable

But the larger story is the rise of the Web, which has surpassed newspapers and radio to become the second most popular source of news for Americans, after TV

TV channels get affiliate fees

LivesOn, a soon-to-launch service that promises to tweet on your behalf even after you die. By analyzing your earlier tweets

Seesaw, the app lets you run instant polls of your friends and ask for advice on anything: what wedding dress to buy, what latte drink to order and soon, perhaps, what political candidate to support.

Take Google Glass, the company’s overhyped “smart glasses,” which can automatically snap photos of everything we see and store them for posterity.

Smartphones are "emasculating" – at least according to Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, who explained his view while addressing an audience wearing a computer headset that made him look slightly like a technological pirate.

Brin suggested that the way people today use their smartphones was unappealing.

"When we started Google 15 years ago," Brin said, "my vision was that information would come to you as you need it. You wouldn't have to search query at all."

A new version of the Facebook News Feed will be unveiled

major overhauls of the News Feed, like the one coming this evening, are not that regula

the News Feed is for: it's there to tell you what your friends have been up to.