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Simfin

online safety and digital citizenship specialist

Parents/Carers News

18 January 2022

Opposition to Covid vaccinations has come in many forms, but none stranger than the "sovereign citizen" defence.

It uses defunct ancient English law to try to challenge regulations.

Some anti-vaccination protesters outside schools and hospitals have used this to hand out fake legal documents to teachers, parents and health workers.

Others have sought to remove Covid patients from intensive care wards, citing non-existent "common law" empowering them to do so.

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17 January 2022

A new initiative to divert young people away from criminality has been launched after cyber attacks designed to block access to schools’ networks or websites more than doubled during the Covid-19 pandemic.

There was a 107 per cent increase in reports from the police cyber prevent network of students as young as nine deploying DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks from 2019 to 2020.

Many referrals into the NCCU’s Prevent team are for children of secondary school age, with the median age at 15 and the youngest at nine.

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17 December 2021

Facebook owner Meta says it has banned seven surveillance companies for targeting users on its platforms.

A new report by Meta says about 50,000 users will receive warnings about the "malicious activities".

It accused surveillance firms of actions like creating fake accounts, befriending targets and using hacking methods to harvest information.

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15 December 2021

Eilish particularly criticised the way pornography can depict women's bodies and sexual experiences.

"I didn't understand why that was a bad thing - I thought it was how you learned how to have sex," Eilish said about watching, adding her mother was "horrified" when she told her.

"I was an advocate and I thought I was one of the guys and would talk about it and think I was really cool for not having a problem with it and not seeing why it was bad."

The singer-songwriter said she believed viewing the content while so young had "destroyed" her brain and caused her to suffer nightmares.

Eilish said it is a "real problem" that porn could skewer wider understandings of what is normal during sex, including around consent.

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12 December 2021

The parents of a 15-year-old autistic girl who died by suicide after her school did not monitor her online activity have described the circumstances of her death as a “catastrophic failure” as they warned the Department for Education (DfE) against complacency.

Frances-Rose Thomas, known as Frankie, took her own life at home in Witley, Surrey, on 25 September 2018 after reading a story that involved suicide on a school iPad, which had no safety features.

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