Safe surfing in the internet. Internet is a means of communications for little and… older children. Even adults often ignore its rules and must learn them from children, which undoubtedly spend a great amount of time surfing. What should our young friends be careful while being online? First of all their personal data. Personal data are all those information that determine us as individuals, students, persons. That is that kind of data that make us unique and different from the rest and individuate us. Which are these data? Even just our name and surname are personal data. Our home address, telephone number or other data, if combined. Our school, class, friends, gender, age are not difficult to be combined and determine who we are. Our habits, information about our parents are all personal data. And of course financial matters of our family, like e.g. the amount of money that our parents earn, or things about our health (members of family that are sick or anything relevant to our health) are sensitive personal data which we should never reveal online. Why should we not reveal our personal data? The most basic reason is that some people are interested in gathering information about us, so that we can become recipients of their advertising messages or their services. In this way, others form an image about our habits by concentrating a lot of information about us, what we like and dislike, and as a result we become target of personalized advertising, which is quite difficult to avoid. Things become even more dangerous when we disclose our personal data to people that we do not know, because they may take advantage of us, by blackmailing us that they may reveal our information to others. Internet provides easy communication at a worldwide scale. You meet boys and girls and make friends from all over the world. Are these friendships true? The only true friendships are those in real live and test themselves through time and reality. Internet gives us the opportunity to make “friends” but we can never be too careful about them. That is because when we communicate through the Internet we can never know who replies to us. It can be a student, but it may be someone older that may want to know us and take advantage of us. The most important thing is that we never arrange meetings with people that we’ve met online. If we want to meet our internet pals in real life, we must always inform our parents first, meet them in public where there are people around, and never alone. When we are online we don’t illegally download songs and movies. Free is not always legal. There are a lot of programs in order to download music or movies for free, but we should know that these programs may harm our computer and eventually cost even more than legally buying a film or a song. These programs may install viruses or other harmful software to our computer and can cause damage that is not easily repaired. Most importantly: When online we are always careful of the photos we upload and of what we share about us. Because what we upload may stay there forever, even if we take it down, it may be copied and already downloaded to tens or thousands of computers in the World Wide Web. Why is this important? Because we won’t always be children and students. You are the businessmen, politicians, doctors, journalists of tomorrow, you will create families and surely you will have to search for a job. What will your future employers, spouses, work partners think of your jokes and of the photos you upload? Internet is the future, ours and of the whole world. Let’s explore it safely! Published: AEROSTATO magazine of the Ministry of Education and Religious Affairs, January 2008.