Majority of Indian Kids Came Across Harmful Online Experiences

As per a recent survey 'Norton Online Family Report' carried out by research firm Norton for security vendor Symantec, around eight out of ten young Internet users in India have faced harmful online experiences. Norton carried out this survey on 500 adults as well as 200 children in the age group of 8-17 years.

The survey findings reveal some other shocking details. Almost 50% of Indian parents do not have any idea that their children came across harmful online experiences. Security experts opine that this only implies a wide gap between parents and their far more technologically-advanced children, as far as online activities are concerned.

Consumer Business Head of Symantec, Effendy Ibrahim, stated that they consider obscene content, violent images, threat from strangers on social networking and other kinds of harassment on Web as harmful content for children between the age group of 8-17, as per the statement published by ciol.com on June 23, 2010.

Further, the report states that almost 24% of Indian children have committed some bad activity online for which they have repented later on and this has happened mainly when they have replied to some e-mail or online scam. However, 83% of children admitted and replied that they actually ended up in downloading a PC virus.

In addition, 67% of children surveyed accepted that they came across violent or naked images while surfing the Web. Security experts commented that nude images shown on malevolent websites can usually result in installation of computer viruses.

The report also reveals that 66% of Indian children do not stay alert of the mails that sound too good to be true, 56% generally believe in the online offers at the first glance and 55% are not careful of several pop-ups. Unfortunately, this is a bad indication implying that children are not careful about their online activities.

Study conducted in other countries also discovered that most of the parents in countries like Brazil, US, and Canada like to impose control on children by using software control tools like spyware as compared to other countries like China and India where parents believe in exercising control though general rules, like controlling usage hours.

Lastly, nearly 68% of Indian parents claimed that they have imposed strict rules concerning their child's Internet usage, while only 34% had truly employed parental controls on the computer used by their children.

Related article: Majority of Internet-linked PCs Unsafe, Says Secunia

» SPAMfighter News - 7/1/2010