Today's teenagers and teenagers have never known a world without Google and are clearly more tech-savvy than their parents. The Internet offers them many opportunities, some productive, others for wasting time, others instead that hide really upsetting dangers, not to be believed for someone who doesn't know them. One of the dangers comes from the Ask.fm social network service, a question and answer site that is really popular with children aged 11-16. While it seems harmless as a site, Ask's big problem is that it fosters and encourages digital bullying, where anyone can speak badly or maliciously about classmates or other people anonymously.
There are news reports of some suicides of teenagers provoked by the use that is made of Ask.fm, which seems to really unleash the most bitter wickedness of people.
Ask.fm works like this : once I am registered, I can create my profile a bit like Facebook.
At this point other people can ask us personal questions that we will have to answer to describe ourselves.
The system is certainly intriguing and becomes a way of asking questions to people and friends who might not ask themselves in person.
Ask.fm also allows you to ask questions anonymously, without making our name appear. Staying behind anonymity makes it easier to ask intimate or embarrassing questions. Of course, you can also not answer, but, as in any social network, if you are not actively participating, it becomes like not being there. With this function, Ask can be used easily to insult people, to ask embarrassing questions, to reveal friends' secrets and compromise their reputation in real life. This is, none the less that, Cyber-bullying .
Another aspect of Ask.fm is that from here private conversations with strangers can begin which can become dangerous, especially for younger and inexperienced girls.
He does not have an Ask chat, but a question that is asked very often is to ask the name on Kik Messenger, the chat app where you can remain anonymous, which goes perfectly with Ask.fm. If everyone who wants to speak badly about a person is chatting privately on Kik and agreeing on how to hit the target, the result can become truly disruptive against the intended victim.
It should also be considered that in Ask.fm the moderation of the questions and the control of the answers is almost completely absent and that the profile is always public, with no possibility to hide it to show it only to friends. The only thing that can be done in the privacy settings is to deny the possibility of asking anonymous questions.
For these reasons, even if you had 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 them to delete the account.
I want to point out that I would never, ever, advise parents to limit the use of technology to their children or to prohibit one site over another. In this case, however, since actively participating in Ask.fm can have implications in real life, it would be wise to at least teach children the potential dangers of the internet by urging them to stay away.
Deleting the Ask account is not as simple as you would expect even if there are two options, one to deactivate, one to cancel Ask forever. To deactivate the Ask account, access 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 written data and 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 must contact the managers of Ask.fm 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 satisfied within 30 days and the profile will be completely deleted.
The only thing left to do is to disconnect Ask.fm from Facebook and Twitter, going to the settings of the respective sites, to the app section.
I should have written this article at least a year ago, but better late than never.
