When it comes to children and social networking, as any parent will attest, you need to be careful.
Children still haven’t entirely learnt about the realities of their respective offline worlds that us adults take for granted. And once we include the “Wild West” of cyberspace into their lives, it’s easy to see how kids can get caught out by the myriad of lurking dangers.
For many parents of young children, Facebook is a justified and definitive no-go. But despite Facebook’s age restriction policy of no under-13s, the policy relies on self-certification. Something many youngsters have no problem flouting.
So the introduction of a child-centric social network app from a large, global, trusted brand is likely to be good news for parents of kids eager to get online. It’s called LEGO Life, and much like traditional social networking, kids can create accounts and share information such as photos of their LEGO creations.
They can also personalise their accounts to fit their own personal tastes as well as customise their newsfeeds.
However LEGO have understandably been keen to stress that child safety is a high priority and many of the new social networking sites features are focused around that.
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For starters, children won’t be able to speak to other LEGO Life members using text, as to avoid bullying or harassment, and whilst kids can comment on each other’s photos, comments are restricted to a pre-approved keyboard selection of emoticons.
Kids cannot enter text comments and must use emoticons.
Kids cannot upload photos of themselves or give away any personal information on the site, nor are they ever asked to give any kind of personal information away. There is no option to purchase anything on the app (much to the relief of many parents, no doubt!) and the entire app is closely monitored both by bots and humans to ensure that nothing untoward is going on.
Also, kids don’t set their username nor have their own photos as avatars. Usernames are pre-selected using a random three-word combination and avatars are customisable LEGO faces.
LEGO say that popular characters like Batman and some of the LEGO Friends characters will occasionally pop up and comment on members photos.
The LEGO Life app is available at both the iOS store for iPads or iPhones as well as Google Play for Android devices.
