Every year, more and more children use the Internet. Most parents are well aware that there are pages with unwanted content, such as pornography, scenes of violence and drug use, etc. However, many parents cannot imagine which specific categories of unwanted websites their children visit the most or how often they visit them. Analyzing a series of data, Kaspersky Lab outlined the online search “patterns” of many young users.
Kaspersky Lab's research focused on ten categories of unwanted online content: pornographic/sensual content, illegal software, drugs, violence, abusive content, weapons, gambling, anonymous proxy servers, payment systems, and online games.
The 10 prohibited categories
Typically, parents consider three categories of unwanted content as… extremely undesirable for their children. These include pornographic/sensual material, violence, and drugs. For these three categories, the research reached the following conclusions:
• Almost all over the world, sites in the “pornographic/sensual material” category are – by a wide margin – in first place in terms of traffic, based on notifications from Kaspersky Lab’s Parental Control unit. The highest percentages of visits to pages with pornographic/sensual content were recorded in Japan (74.9%) and France (68.9%). Mexico was in third place (56.3%).
• Sites in the “violence” category are most frequently visited from Mexico (8.6%), the USA (7%) and Europe – mainly from the UK and Spain (4.8% for each country). Based on Parental Control statistics, sites in this category are not particularly popular. However, it is worth mentioning that it is practically impossible for someone to enter these sites by mistake, as they must have previously been intentionally located on the Internet. This means that parents should pay attention to this risk and be concerned.
• The highest traffic to websites in the “drugs” category is again recorded in Mexico (1.8%) and the USA (1.4%). In third place is the United Kingdom (0.9%).
The category of illegal software is particularly popular in China, which records the highest percentage of traffic (69.4%, compared to 24% in Spain and 10.6% in Japan). Websites in this category also pose an additional risk, as they do not just offer illegal software, but often promote it to the computers of potential victims.
The remaining categories in percentages
• Abusive content: Russia (10.7%), Italy (9%), Mexico (7.7%)
• Weapons: Russia (26.4%), Italy (13.7%), USA (12%)
• Gambling: Italy (15.7%) USA (15.4%), UK (13.5%)
• Anonymous proxy servers: Mexico (2.1%), UK (1.2%), Italy (0.8%)
• Credit card payment systems: Italy (8.5%), France (5.5%), Germany (2%)
• Online games: Germany (41.1%), Australia (13.4%), USA (11.2%)
Commenting on the findings, Anna Larkina, Senior Web Content Analyst at Kaspersky Lab, said: “Along with unwanted content, the Internet also poses other risks that are equally important for children, such as cyber-bullying or trolling. Bullies can exploit all possible online channels – including social networking sites, forums, chats and messengers. When used in combination, they can cause victims great psychological distress. In reality, the fight against trolling is not so simple, and therefore, the parental control function is not so effective in combating it. As a rule, children cannot cope with their attackers on their own. Therefore, parents play an important role in protecting children from cyber-bullying. Ideally, parents should pay special attention to their children’s online activity.”.
Source: kathimerini.gr
