A large majority of parents regularly monitor their children's social networking accounts, a poll by privacy group Truste shows.
The research discovered that 72% snoop on their children's activity on a regular basis, with 35% of them checking every day. Around 10% said that they could secretly access their kids' account- the study doesn't tell how- and 18% said that they had either been told off or embarrassed online by their parents.
Speaking of the survey, Anne Collier, the co-director of ConnectSafely.com, said, "http://www.truste.com's survey reinforces what we're seeing – that parents and teens share a keen interest in teen privacy in social network sites, that most teens are acting on those privacy interests, and that parents are, at the same time acknowledging that and wisely seeing the need to support teens' responsible use with some monitoring,"
But the research also discovered that 4 out of 5 teenagers use privacy settings to hide their private content from parents and/or certain friends.
And 68% said that they accepted friend requests from strangers at some point in time, with 8% accepting all invitations they get.
“The data clearly shows that parents place the utmost importance on their teens’ On-line privacy and control of their personal information”, said Fran Maier, president of Truste. "But protecting the privacy of teens on social networks is not easy as they can be technically adept".
Almost
90% parents are in favor of default privacy settings on every teen
account to restrict the amount of info available to the public.
