Tech bytes for tea?

Singapore kids-tech company myFirst has launched a social community app for children – myFirst Circle. It provides a safe, walled social network for kids that enables their parents to monitor, control and guide them on the dos and don’ts of posting and interacting on social networks.

myFirst Circle can be downloaded from the App Store for Apple iOS devices or Google Play for Android smartphones or tablets. It can also be accessed through a myFirst Fone smartwatch.

The new myFirst App provides a social community platform where children can post and share messages, photos and videos with their family and friends.

The parents are able to monitor and control who their children allow into their “circles” of family, besties and friends, as well as the information that they share with these circles.

Parents may change a child’s post settings to enable access by “lower” circles (eg. Acquaintances) or to restrict access to only the inner circles (eg. Family and/or Besties).

This enables parents to supervise and guide their children on the etiquette and precautions to take when sharing on online social networks so that when they are old enough to get onto “grown-up” social networks such as Facebook, Instagram etc, they would be well-coached on the ins-and-outs of sharing media on these networks as well as dos and don’ts in interacting with others on the Web.

Basically, contacts can be accepted into one of four circles: Family, Besties, Friends and Acquaintances.

These four hierarchical circles determine which of a child’s posts that other members of a his/her circle can and cannot see.

For example, all members in a child’s Family circle will be able to see EVERYTHING the child shares.

Those in the Acquaintances circle will have access to the least number of posts.

So if a child marks a photo as viewable by Besties, only members of his/her Family and Besties circles will see the photo.

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