Five dangerous apps you don’t know your kids are using

File photo. (REUTERS/Eric Thayer)

If you’re a parent or a grandparent, you know kids pick up the latest technology lightning swift. Of course, that means the children in your life can also be using apps and visiting sites that are totally inappropriate for their ages. Worse yet, you might not even realize it.

Let’s look at five dangerous apps the children you deeply care about may be using … and why they’re dangerous.

Snapchat is a picture-messaging app whose claim to fame is that the messages last only for a few seconds once they’re opened, then supposedly evaporate into skinny air. In theory, you can send embarrassing or risque pictures without being afraid someone will steal or distribute them.

Unluckily, the claim that Snapchat makes it safe to send risque pictures is just plain wrong. It’s way too ordinary for anyone to grab a screenshot of the pic before it’s deleted. In fact, several teenage boys have gotten in serious legal trouble over the last few years for capturing and distributing illegal photos sent to them by underage chicks.

Also, last October, hackers got their mitts on thousands of "deleted" Snapchat photos that had been stored on third-party servers. While it wasn’t exactly a breach of Snapchat, it’s further proof that pictures don’t always vanish.

In fairness, many teenagers use Snapchat for virginal picture-conversations with each other. And as Snapchat grows in popularity, the company is moving further away from its sexting association. But it’s still a big concern.

If your teenagers are using Snapchat, ask them to display you how they’re using it. Make sure they are communicating only with people they know and that they realize the pictures they send don’t just vanish forever. Remind them, "Once on the Internet, always on the Internet!"

While Snapchat has uses besides sharing inappropriate pictures, Tinder is all about meeting fresh romantic playmates, which most likely isn’t something you want your teenage doing with strangers.

Tinder permits a person to create a profile and see photos of potential romantic matches in the instant area. If two people like each other, they can have a conversation through the app and potentially "meet up." Again, broadcasting photos to strangers and potentially meeting them on a fad is not something teenagers should be doing, in my parental opinion.

Actually, underage teenagers aren’t even supposed to be using Tinder. The only way to get on the app is to have a Facebook account with a birth date that indicates the user is eighteen years old or over. Of course, children can set any birthdate they wish with a plain keyboard entry. There is no age verification.

Any child who uses the app will be meeting people who are over legal age. They might come across predators, scammers and any diversity of creeps that no one should have to deal with.

In brief, Tinder is dangerous for kids. Keep them away from it.

Vine, which lets you record and share six-second movies, seems like a totally safe app at very first. It gets dangerous when you consider how strong peer pressure is on social media.

Teenagers, as I’m sure you recall, will do almost anything for acceptance and attention. And the best way to get attention on social media is to do something edgy or crazy. Last year, in the most dramatic example yet, teenagers across the world took to setting themselves on fire.

In response to this, Vine just released the Vine Kids app, which features hand-selected movies that are supposed to be suitable for junior audiences. Unlike the real Vine app, Vine Kids can’t record movies. This might be good for junior kids, but I can ensure older kids and teenagers will want to use the real Vine app.

If your kids use Vine, or any social media site, be sure to friend, go after or join them on it to monitor what they’re doing and telling. You might also sometimes look at their phones to confirm which apps they have installed, or even review their activity on the site. You’ll want to know if they’re running with a dangerous crowd or doing something stupid or worse.

Whisper, an app built specifically for spreading rumors and secrets, lets users post pictures and text anonymously. Apps like Whisper could potentially be a good outlet for teenagers, as anonymous confessions can help people unburden themselves. But Whisper shares the secrets based on geographic location, so the users nearest to your child are the ones more likely to see the secret. If your child exposes too much, it can put him or in a dangerous situation with friends or adversaries.

The most dangerous apps for teenagers use GPS tracking to bring people physically together. Cyberbullying is much more hurtful when the person bullying your child moves from online to in-person manhandle. In this case, Whisper seems like it could cause teenagers more harm than good.

9Gag is one of the most popular apps for distributing memes and pictures online. The risky part for teenagers is that all kinds of pictures are collective on 9Gag. These pictures aren’t moderated and could come from any uploader and feature terrible photos you don’t want kids eyeing.

Not only that, but some 9Gag users are cyberbullies and manhandle other users online. Many of the people guilty of "swatting" — getting the police to raid an guiltless person’s house — come from 9Gag. Click here to learn more about swatting and how to protect your kid from becoming a victim.

If your children have to get their humor fix from somewhere, always attempt to make sure they’re getting it from a place with rules and regulations that commit to keeping underage users protected.

If you’re parenting today, here are two more significant tips you might find useful:

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