Have a seat parents. This could be a bit unsettling.
According to this report from OnlineFamily.Norton - a web-management tool that, among other functions, helps parents block certain web content from their children - kids are not quite as naive as we'd like to believe. In the report issued Friday, OnlineFamily details kids' top 100 search terms collected anonymously through Symantec between February and July 2009.
Some on the list are not surprising in the least, and some are actually encouraging. Michael Jackson (11th), Miley Cyrus (15th), Club Penguin (22nd), Amazon (35th) and weather (44th) all ranked in the top 50.
But other search terms are downright terrifying. "Sex" ranked fourth while "porn" was sixth; "Boobs" ranked 28th and "naked girls" ranked a few spots ahead of "Playboy" at 86th. In between were a handful of non-flattering slang terms for genitalia.
Of course, none of the parents out there have searched any of those terms themselves. But if they had, they would have seen that simply typing "sex" into a search bar can yield a host of explicit images, video and audio - much of it without requiring sign-up or registration.
The web is no different than any other public space where children need to be supervised. But unfortunately, there are no security guards and there is no 911 in cyberspace. Dangers and strangers are allowed to roam the web unchecked - which makes parents the best (and only) police.
Supervise wisely.
Friday, August 14, 2009
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