BY CARA SHUMAKER
FOREST HILLS JUNIOR
Cyber bullying and Internet predators are threatening adolescents through networking sites.
In an effort to raise awareness and prevent these threats, Cyber-I has been created.
Cyber-I is the Cambria County Cyber-Predator Unit.
Creators Dominic Cannizzaro and his brother, Carmine, summarized the program by saying, “The Cambria County Cyber-Predator Unit will be a private entity working in conjunction with the district attorney’s office, local law-enforcement agencies and the area’s school districts to take proactive measures to protect the county’s children from online bullies and sexual predators.”
“The first step was putting together a program to help kids track anybody if someone was picking on them,” Dominic Cannizzaro said.
“These are controls for the computer. It was put together to be proactive,” he said.
This program will be available to anyone who wishes to use it on his or her MySpace, Facebook or other networking site.
Adults and children can use it to protect themselves from predators and bullying, but the police are also able to use it to monitor unusual activity on a social networking page.
Parental controls can be used in conjunction with other privacy settings.
“The police are able to use it. It’s not law enforcement. Law enforcers regularly get calls from concerned kids or concerned parents and there isn’t enough manpower to handle it all,” Dominic Cannizzaro said.
“If it gets to a point where we can turn it into the law enforcement, then we’ve done our job. Parental controls are offered, but it’s not really what we do,” he said.
“We proactively search the Internet for online predators and bullies by going into online chat rooms and setting up MySpace and Facebook pages.
“We also provide participating school district students with a logo that can be placed on their social networking site to show they are protected by the unit.”
Although Cyber-I will help the police with calls from concerned parents and children, that wasn’t the primary reason Cyber-I came to be.
“We created it mainly to protect kids online,” Dominic Cannizzaro said.
The brothers plan to launch a marketing campaign.
“We want to do a heavy marketing campaign with billboards, newspaper and press coverage,” Dominic Cannizzaro said.
After the program launches in Cambria County, the plan for Cyber-I is to go nationwide.
“We want to start in Cambria County and see how it goes. We want to take it around the state and then hopefully around the nation,” Dominic Cannizzaro said.
The brothers hope that students will want to use the program to protect themselves, especially if they are being bullied.
“The logo is pretty cool. Kids will want to put it on their pages. Realistically, it’s not going to monitor the site. It’s a picture with a link that says, ‘This child is protected by the Cambria County Cyber Predator Unit,’ and the IP (Internet protocol) address will be recorded,” Dominic Cannizzaro said.
The Cyber-I launch date has not been announced.
“The Internet should be fun. People shouldn’t try to take that away,” Dominic Cannizzaro said.
