Airdrops and BlueTooth
A new concern that we’ve seen recently is students being sent unwanted files – usually images or videos – through a Bluetooth enabled ‘Airdrop’. There are two things we’d ask you to help your children with about this.
Firstly, they need to go to their settings and make sure they are only accepting files from their contacts. That should mean that anything they receive is from somebody they know and trust. It also means we can narrow down who is sending inappropriate material. Alternatively, they turn off BlueTooth on their phones other than when they definitely need to use it. The only problem at the moment with that is that the NHS Test and Trace contact app relies on BlueTooth and whilst it seems that this might close soon, we want to encourage everyone to use it whilst it’s there.
The second thing is to talk to your children about not downloading, looking at or sharing inappropriate material. This sometimes just means ordinary everyday pictures of other students which they should not have taken and should certainly not be sharing. Sometimes it means more troubling images downloaded from elsewhere, including violence or nudity. As a part of this, you might want to go through the files your children keep on their phones.
It’s often very difficult to identify where a file comes from but if we do find students sharing inappropriate material we will treat this very seriously.
