Young people struggle to maintain their privacy online

The following was taken from the Insafe survey was sponsored by UPC, with support from the European Commission. Further survey results will be available on the Insafe website in the coming weeks.

This survey just goes to show how important it is that online security is covered in schools with users of social networks being educated about the issues. Here are a few snippets:

• 57% of young people make their online social network profiles public and disclose a great deal of personal information, according to a recent survey of 21,872 people across Europe organised by European Schoolnet, coordinator of European Insafe network.
• Almost a third of youngsters responding indicated that they didn't know what to do about making information public or private.
• In some contexts, many young people are aware of what to do: for instance, when using MSN, 58% of young people surveyed reported that they would not accept a request for contact from a person they didn't know.
• The under 10 age group seems to have relatively little awareness of the dangers of going to meet someone they have been chatting with online. More than a third indicated hypothetically they would go to meet online contacts without telling parents.
• However, awareness increases greatly for 10 to 13 year olds, and then steadily declines; 22% of 17 year olds would forget to tell their parents about such a meeting and 24% of 18 year olds would go alone.
• A similar pattern of increased risk-taking from age 14 to 17 can be repeatedly seen in a detailed analysis of the survey results, underlining the need to tailor awareness-raising campaigns to target these age groups.

LL4Schools enforces the privacy of personal, profile data - currently we prevent all but the user's biogaphy from being made public. All other profile data is made available only to other logged in users: and all accounts on LL4Schools are created at the request of schools with full traceability and no self-sign up. If there is demand from users we could, on a school-by-school basis, restrict such data further.