Half of All UK Parents Have No Clue of What Their Kids Do Online. And They Don’t Seem To Care

I think that there have been too many talks about how important online privacy protection and parental control are for anyone who wants their children to be safe online and to avoid all and any dangers that are abundant on the World Wide Web. Yet it looks like even despite of all the talks, there are still not enough parents who value parental control enough actually implement it.

The reason for this rant is that internet security firm Trend Micro has released results of a new survey today related to parental control in the UK. And the results are absolutely outrageous with as many as 50% of all respondents admitting that they have no idea what their children do online at all yet only 3% of them actually using various parental control tools to monitor the behavior.

In fact, some parents either know what their children do online or have some general idea most probably based on what they see on TV and in newspapers and this information makes them concerned: 55% of parents would prefer their children to spend their online time learning instead of socializing in various social networking communities.

But such concerns combined with lack of understanding of teens’ online behavior somehow don’t make the parents want to get more information as 97% of all respondents admitted that they don’t monitor their children when it comes to their use of the internet.

And honestly, it sounds only natural for a parent to want to know where his son or daughter spends their time and who they talk to – be it online or offline. Of course it may probably feel that your child is safe enough when he or she is sitting on a sofa in your very own living room with a notebook browsing the sites you have no idea about – contrary to when he or she is somewhere out late in the night.

But things that look harmless may actually turn to be very harmful instead – and determining the level of harm will take knowledge, the knowledge that such parents don’t even attempt to want to get. And the parents that prefer to ignore online activities of their children will still realize some control is needed sooner or later – and of course it better be sooner.

In fact, I’d expect similar (or probably worse) results of such a survey in a country like Russia where the web population rarely includes representatives of two generations of the same family with teens and young adults (that either don’t have kids yet or the kids are too young to consider getting online at all) being the most important groups of internet users here.

But for a country like UK I’d really want the situation to look different as for now it looks like the parents don’t seem to care at all – and it will take a number of outrageous situations where children are abused online in this or that manner that will also get a broad coverage in the mainstream media for the society (and the parents in the society) to realize their indifference can result in some terrible consequences. I don’t want to sound gloomy but unfortunately I have a feeling that hoping that such indifference can be changed somehow miraculously without any terrible accidents involved would be too optimistic.