Wow.  That was great presentation.  

Both my kids want iPhones (they're seven and ten years old).  We've told them they can get flip phones when they're twelve, and after that we'll see.  I'd like to show this to them, but they'd be bored by the plagiarism stuff and and are still too young for the scary sexual predator warnings.  Still, before letting them have phones, I'd like to show them this or something like it.  They're already starting to play video games that connect them with people online and make Tik-tok videos and whatnot, so we warn them about people they've never met in person or sharing information, but this guy does a really good job of it.  Plus the action figure scenarios are spectacular.

I have to say I wasn't surprised by any of it.  I moved to Seattle in the mid-nineties and had email before almost anyone in the Midwest had even heard of it, so I got a sense of the anonymous scams and chain letters and general dangers of the internet decades ago now.  It's always kind of shocking to see just how stupid young people can be, but never really surprising.

There was some information I didn't know though: I didn't realize an organization such as CO-STAR existed, though I'm glad to know it does.  I didn't realize you could buy papers online.  I have to admit part of me was like, "Huh.  That could come in handy in a pinch."  I was a little concerned that he was giving these students bad ideas by pointing them at these sites, but he successfully made the case against it.  The main thing that struck me was that pictures taken with a smart phone have a GPS marker that can be traced using free software.  I don't understand how exactly that would work, but that seems more like a speed freak's paranoid fantasy than something you'd hear from a legal expert.  Yikes.

His most important advice was his general, oft-repeated advice not to share incriminating or embarrassing information online.  Seems like common sense, though it's obviously not.  Also, for both young and very old people, his advice about detecting phishing and other scams was good.  I have a pretty good sense of these things as I'm a jaded, cynical old man, but people who are young enough to be naïve or too old to be hip to online shady offers need to hear this stuff.  

Again, I hope this guy or someone like him is still doing this when my kids are old enough to deal with these issues.  The story about the girl who committed suicide after sharing a topless photo of herself was heartbreaking.  Humorous yet terrifying presentations like this should be a regular part of high school curricula, not so much for the legal issues as for the cautionary information about online activity in general.