October marks National Cyber Security Awareness month and Yahoo!, along with our industry peers, will be putting extra emphasis on online safety to help create a safer digital world through education and awareness activities.

Global Online Safety PSA

Today, more and more digital citizens are connecting to each other across various devices and Web services, making online safety paramount. Over the last year, Yahoo! has collaborated with a coalition of government, industry, and nonprofit organizations to develop a powerful and impactful consumer awareness campaign. Today, we have unveiled the unified public awareness message to help digital citizens stay safer online: "Stop. Think. Connect."

This message evolved from President Obama's call for a memorable national public awareness campaign focused on cybersecurity.  "Stop. Think. Connect." is designed to be a simple tool that can be easily understood and used by everyone online. It's a strong, effective message because it is actionable and it puts power in the hands of the user. Through the coalition's extensive research, we learned that consumers are anxious to take personal control of their online actions and help the greater online community. In our own research, we found this was true, too, with the majority of parents taking action to manage their children's online safety.

Members of the coalition are supporting this campaign in various ways, including promoting it on their websites and highlighting it in consumer-facing communications. At Yahoo!, we will leverage our network of consumer services, which reaches 600 million users worldwide, to promote and increase global awareness of this effort.

Digital Citizenship Summit

Additionally, we are gearing up for Yahoo!'s fourth annual Digital Citizenship Summit on Oct. 15. Yahoo! is partnering with the Santa Clara County Office of Education and leading national nonprofit organizations to help educators create digital environments that put safety within arm's reach of children.

Discussions will center on how it takes collaboration among parents, teachers, nonprofit advocates, law enforcement, and Internet companies to create a safer online environment for children. Educational leaders from San Francisco Bay Area schools K–12 will learn strategies to build a safety network, including student guidance techniques and online incident mitigation.

Attendees will also hear from national safety experts, including Common Sense Media, ConnectSafely, iKeepSafe, i-Safe, and NetSmartz.

Educators will receive a sneak peek at iKeepSafe's Generation Safe™: New Media Mentor for Digital Citizenship™ program, and will have the opportunity to be a part of the pilot program for free.

And that's not all. As part of our ongoing efforts with our nonprofit partners, we will be supporting a number of initiatives:

• Common Sense Media's national TV and online public awareness campaign, called "Power to the People," is designed to educate parents about the impact of media and technology on kids. Yahoo! is helping to increase awareness of this campaign by donating advertising inventory across our network.
• I have been appointed as the co-chair of the Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI). The FOSI annual conference, to be held Nov. 9–10, is a marquee annual event that brings together thought leaders across government, industry, and nonprofit sectors to collaborate on solutions in online child safety.

It will be a busy month for Yahoo!'s online child-safety efforts and we are eager to help digital citizens and educational leaders create safer online experiences for themselves and the greater community.

-Catherine Teitelbaum, Yahoo!'s Director of Child Safety and Product Policy