Summery of Article- Social networking has hidden dangers for teens:

Social networking has hidden dangers for teens:

This article is about a survey taken by 1,000 teens and 1,000 parents, to see how often teens spend on social networking sites, what they do when there on them and is it consentual or not. The article shows that at least a quater of teen’s have regretted things they have done on their networking site’s including cyber bullying, semi-nude or nude photos and creating false identitys.

The poll shows that parents don’t usually know what there children are up to on these sites, and they don’t know how to control there use. With teens now using these sites daily the risks of them ruining there futures is only a click of a button away. The survey shows that a large percentage of teens now check these sites more then ten times a day.

Social networking sites allow members to create a virtual profile of themselves sharing photos, brief thoughts and private information such as date of birth, employment info and address’s. The survey also shows that teens do not understand that deleting this information doesn’t mean it is permently eradicated. With a simple search of a name from future employer’s the deleted content can still be shown creating a kind of cyber “tattoo” that can’t be erased. This can create enormous consequences for teenagers futures as a silly offhand comment that they have posted might be the reason they don’t get accepted into college.

Researchers are stating that part of the problem are the parents. The survey shows that parents don’t understand how dangerous unsupervised internet sessions can be. Without proper guidence, teens have posted such private information as dates they will be away on holidays thinking that this information will stay private, yet in the hands of the wrong person can be incredibly dangerous. Parents should warn teens of these danger’s before letting them log on.

Some statistics from this poll are:

39% of teens have posted something that they have later regretted

24% have hacked into other peoples profiles therefore stealing there identity

13% have posted nude or semi-nude pictures of themselves or others on their profiles

37% have used there sites to participate in cyber bullying.

Original Link to article:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/08/10/BA9T1954T7.DTL