Chatting online

We opened an email account for Sindhu after we moved here so she could keep in touch with her friends. She only checks it sporadically mainly because she is still adjusting to typing and finds it tedious and cumbersome. Today, her friend who has an older sister introduced her to chatting. They just saw each other a few minutes before and they only live a few blocks from each other but Sindhu totally enjoyed the novelty of chatting with someone online. I set some rules, she can't accept anyone's invite to chat unless approved by us. She can't invite anyone unless approved by us. She can only chat when one of us is in the room. This whole chatting phenomena somewhat scares me, it opens up a lot of doors to the outside world. Sindhu hardly uses our computer so I don't think I have a lot to worry about. She doesn't have a computer in her room so it makes it easier to track what websites she browses and she mainly uses the computer for researching school projects and playing a few online games. We were however thinking of buying her a Mac and setting it up in her room but I'm still debating whether that's the right thing to do. She has started hanging out in her room and locking her door to keep her brother out, sometimes on the pretext that she's doing her homework but I think she mostly reads. She is also asked to cut articles from the newspapers for research projects and the Indian newspapers have inappropriate content with gory pictures and articles on crimes, murders and robberies which is not easy to miss. It's going to be harder and harder to shelter her but I get some comfort in seeing 12-13 year old girls who are mature, easy to talk to yet still have plenty of innocence in them even though they have easy access to the internet and newspapers.