Children at risk on Facebook
According to a recent representative survey, a quarter of Hungarian children under the age of 13 are already on Facebook. On the one hand, this is contrary to the rules of the community portal, and on the other hand, it raises significant data protection and educational issues.
According to the rules, I wouldn't be able to do it, but many of the Hungarian children under the age of 13 still register on Facebook. In a survey conducted by AG Data, researchers asked thousands of Hungarian Internet users whether a child under the age of 13 living in a household uses the largest social networking site.
The results show that 13% of children under the age of 22 living in households using the Internet have already registered on Facebook, and a further 4% of those living in a household with them do not know if they are members of the community site.
It is important that parents regulate their child's internet habits in the same way as they regulate other activities and teach them how to use social portals in the same way as they teach them to ride a bike, warns András Petrányi-Széll, Head of Communications at Hungary.
The sources of danger
There are several dangers for a child on Facebook. Because you don’t yet know what to click and what not to, you can easily fall into the trap of phishers through scam posts and videos. The most common example of this is the misuse of a celebrity’s name and image. Posts like “I can’t believe Miley Cyrus did this” attract children, but such clicks often end in leaking personal information, infecting the computer.
The next option for criminals is to tap your mobile account or credit card. They program applications that say the future in exchange for a premium SMS message, calculate the probability of a relationship being successful, or provide another similar service.
The third source of danger is adults who want to get to know children, who often register under social names as juveniles. It’s important, therefore, that parents teach their child to only tag them back and only chat on Facebook with those they clearly and personally know. For example, there are dozens of Tamás Fluor on the portal, and each of them has many acquaintances, many of whom are children - András Petrányi-Széll points out.
In addition, the malice of contemporaries must be taken into account. Cyberbullying is the phenomenon in which a peered child or teenager is taunted or threatened by his or her peers via the Internet or mobile phone. The most infamous such case is the story of Megan Meier, which ended in the suicide of a teenage girl.
Finally, the last source of danger for the child is for themselves, namely by uploading data and photos that they later want to delete from the internet.
Rules to be followed
An expert from the anti-virus company AG Data points out that it is best not to leave your young child alone while browsing the Internet, but to place the computer in the common area, in the living room, which you can use. This makes it easy to notice if something is bothering you.
To avoid Internet malware, it is lucky if the child does not use the same machine that the parent then handles the banking, but if there is only one computer in the household, create an account for the child with non-administrator privileges.
In addition, it is important to have an updated antivirus running on your machine, and you may want to consider using parental control features that can limit the amount of websites you can visit or even the amount of time your computer can be used.
In connection with Facebook, the child should be explained not to upload pictures of himself or his family without parental consent, to not click on messages he does not understand, and not to talk to strangers in the virtual world — that is, not to tag people whom you do not know personally.
If someone would like to report a user under the age of 13 to Facebook, they can do so on the social portal form. In this case, if Facebook moderators find that the profile belongs to a child under the age of 13, they will delete it.
However, pending the introduction of new data protection provisions in the European Union, there is no way to delete a data simply because it relates to us or our child. According to an AG Data expert, it is most effective in this case to argue with other rights: for example, if a child has uploaded a photo or video we took of it, we can exercise our copyright and take the image off Facebook.
The research was commissioned by G Data by the NRC with a survey of 1000 people. The method of data collection is an online questionnaire survey with multiple stratified, random sampling using the NRC NetPanel. The results are representative of Internet users aged 18-75, at least once a week.
