Teenagers of today have never known a world without Google and are far more tech-savvy than their parents. The Internet offers them many opportunities, some productive, others for wasting time, others instead that hide truly shocking dangers, unbelievable for someone who does not know them.
One of the dangers comes from the Ask.fm social networking service, a very popular question and answer site among 11-16-year-olds. While as a site it seems harmless, Ask’s a big problem is that it foments and encourages digital bullying activity, where anyone can speak badly or maliciously about classmates or other people anonymously.
There are news reports of some teenage suicides caused precisely by the use that is made of Ask.fm, which seems to really unleash the most vulgar wickedness of people.
Ask.fm works like this: once I’m registered, I can create my profile a bit like you do with Facebook.
At this point, other people may ask us personal questions that we will have to answer to describe ourselves.
The system is certainly intriguing and becomes a way to ask questions to people and friends that maybe they wouldn’t ask themselves in person.
Ask.fm also allows you to ask questions anonymously, without having our name appear. By staying behind anonymity it becomes easier to ask intimate or embarrassing questions. Obviously, you can also not answer, but, as in any social network, if you don’t actively participate, it becomes like not being there. With this functioning, Ask can easily be used to insult people, to ask embarrassing questions, to reveal friends’ secrets, and to compromise their reputation in the real world. This is, nothing less than, Cyberbullying.
Another aspect of Ask.fm is that from here they can start private conversations with strangers that can become dangerous, especially for younger and inexperienced girls.
It does not have an Ask chat, but a question that is asked very frequently is to ask for your name on Kik Messenger, the chat app in which you can remain anonymous, which goes perfectly with Ask.fm. If everyone who wants to speak ill of a person is chatting privately on Kik and agreeing on how to hit the target, the result can become truly disruptive to the intended victim.
It should also be considered that in Ask.fm the moderation of questions and the control of answers is almost completely absent and that the profile is always public, without the possibility of hiding it to show it only to friends. The only thing you can do in the privacy settings is to deny the ability to be asked anonymous questions.
For these reasons, even if you have the best of intentions, my advice to everyone is to unsubscribe from Ask.fm.
Parents of teenagers should also check if their son or daughter uses Ask.fm and ask him to delete the account.
I want to emphasize that I would never, ever advise parents to limit the use of technology to their children or to ban one site over another. In this case, however, since actively participating in Ask.fm can have real-life implications, it would be wise to at least teach children about the potential dangers of the internet by urging them to stay away from it.
Deleting the Ask account is not as simple as one would expect although there are two options, one to deactivate, one to cancel Ask forever. To deactivate the Ask account, log into your account, click on the gear icon at the top to enter the options page, and from the Account tab, choose deactivation.
Deactivating the account does not mean deleting all data and written messages, but only hiding them and making them no longer searchable.
Deleting the Ask account is much more difficult because there is no automatic option.
You need to contact the Ask.fm managers using this page, click on the Delete account link, and then follow the guided procedure.
If desired, you can also deactivate the account by clicking the deactivate link, in order to make the cancellation only temporary.
The request will then be fulfilled within 30 days and the profile will be deleted completely.
The only thing left to do is to disconnect Ask.fm from Facebook and Twitter, by going to the settings of the respective sites, to the app section.
I should have written this article at least a year ago, but it is better late than never.
