A NEW survey highlights the fear and confusion felt by many children who use the internet but also found a willingness by children to post personal details on the web.
Some 73 per cent of children surveyed said they were worried about being contacted by someone they didn’t know on the internet. That figure rose to 77 per cent for children in the 9-12 age bracket but was 69 per cent for 13-16 year olds.
The survey of 860 children in 37 schools, aged between 9 and 16, is published by the National Centre for Technology in Education this week to mark Safer Internet Day, which takes place all over Europe tomorrow.
Almost half of those surveyed said they were afraid of someone pretending to be them on internet sites, while 63 per cent said they didn’t know who would use the information they posted online.
Asked about their willingness to post personal details online, 36 per cent said they would post their date of birth and 35 per cent said they would post their full name. However, only 18 per cent of 9-12 year olds said they would post their full name online, compared to 52 per cent of 13-16 year olds. Some 35 per cent said they would post their school’s name online. And 32 per cent said they would post their e-mail address.
Simon Grehan of the National Centre for Technology in Education urged children to become more conscious of their online privacy. He said people who posted photographs on networking sites had no idea where they might end up, despite efforts to limit access.
While a social networking site user can limit access to their photographs to friends, or a subset of friends, he said friends’ comments on the photographs could open up access to another group of people.
People were also infringing upon the privacy of others by posting pictures of friends and family without their permission.
And news media were increasingly using photographs that were posted on social networking sites, said Mr Grehan. This led to concerns about copyright.
“The use of photos from social networking websites raises a number of legal and ethical issues. Simply because material may have been put into the public domain does not always give others the right to exploit its existence.”
He said issues had been raised over the use of photos from personal profile pages on sites such as MySpace after the shootings at Virginia Tech. Mr Grehan urged children and teenagers to avoid posting photographs online they would not want their parents, grandparents or an employer to see.
Tomorrow marks the seventh anniversary of Safer Internet Day in Ireland and is part of the European Commission’s safer internet programme.Minister for Education Batt O’Keeffe will tomorrow launch the Safer Internet Ireland Youth Advisory Panel at the Department of Education.
