A lesson learnt: never entrust anyone with your personal data!

The Northern Ireland WYRED group, comprising 48 children who range from 10 to 11 years old, have now moved into the research phase of the project exploring Cyberbullying, Fake News and Hacking and coming up with their research questions.

One story about hacking came from a 10 year old girl.

“I was going to my grandmother’s for a week’s holiday with my family and she has not got internet connection, so I gave my friend my password to my snapchat so that she would keep up my streaks.”

What are streaks?

“You snap chat a person every day and they have to snap you back in the same 24 hour period and you build up streaks.

My friend sent my password to her friend who passed it onto another friend who I do not know. They hacked into my account and got all my information and I had to make a new account.”

Why did you give your password away?

“Because I would have no wifi or 4G when I was away. If you don’t snap in the same 24 hours you lose the streak and I would have lost 200 days of streaks so I had to give away my password.

I learnt never to give my password away.”