There is a high degree of awareness of safety issues among the young people surveyed and interviewed. They do not seem to be naïve or ignorant of the dangers they could be confronted with. They say that they never (47%) or rarely (22%) talk to people they do not know face to face. They seem to be aware of certain rules they have to respect on the Internet: for example, 68% believe they should not show images of
people on Web sites without their permission. However, it seems likely that they over-estimate their competence: 79% consider they know well how the Internet works; but only 52% of them are able to evaluate the information they retrieve.
In certain countries such as France or Quebec, awareness of the limits and dangers of the Internet has greatly progressed within the last 6 years. Some Europeans are quite critical regarding the information available on the Internet: more than two-thirds of French youth compared to 60% of Quebecers, claim they do not blindly accept what is conveyed on the Internet. This critical view increases with age, particularly amongst girls. Since 2000(Bevort & Bréda, 2001), there has been a complete rever- sal in France in the trend that information acquired on the Internet is reliable. Then only 16% were sceptical of the information obtained through the Internet; today that figure has increased to 68%. The Quebec study reports the same conclusion, though its authors point out that the Google, Wikipedia tandem, do not induce distrust, but on the contrary, evoke a sense of definite trust (Piette et al., 2007).
The need to control what is accessible on the Internet has also increased from 67%
of young Quebecers in 2000 to more than 80% today (90% of girls).
The survey data suggest that for young people the Internet is mostly a means of keeping in touch with friends and the people close to them. It appears that young people appropriate the Internet as a tool to enhance their established relationships and activities. The emphasis on communication with friends and people they know, and of the decline of use of chat rooms and interest in meeting strangers, is a posi- tive feature of the study. However, there is an increase in online gaming, another context for communicating with strangers; though there was no evidence that this was experienced as dangerous. Where harmful situations were referred to in the interviews, they were most commonly cited as experiences heard about from friends rather than experienced directly.
While there are debates in some countries about the dangers of bullying with mobile phones, through voice, text or, most recently, image, this is not reflected as a serious problem in this study. The Danish report indicates a very small number who have had problems, but conclude that the problem is not widespread. Similarly, the UK study contains very little reporting of negative experiences; and of those reported, most had had been heard about rather than directly experienced. The Italian report (Rivoltella & Zoffi, 2006) underlines:
The strong connection between risk perception declared by students (pornography, hackers, dangerous relationships, inconvenient images) and media representation of risks and bad experiences on the Internet, especially on television. Generally students never had bad experiences on line, but they saw them on TV.
The survey data suggests that parents across all the countries, including Quebec, hold fairly liberal views and do not restrict young people’s Internet use to a large extent. For instance, young people engage in the following activities: instant mes- saging (86%), chat (75%), e-mail (89%), games (81%), visits on sites (69%), and downloading (77%). In Quebec, 9 in 10 young people say their parents control what they do on the Internet only rarely or never. Parents do not seem to be included in their children’s “Internet universe.” The young people say that they talk to their par- ents about this medium rarely (32%), sometimes (31%), often or very often (15%).
Twenty-one percent never talk about it. However, this varied across countries: in France, for instance, 37% talk to their parents about the Internet sometimes, and 25% often or very often.
It appears that parents do not restrict their children’s cell phone uses. Eighty-four percent of the young people say that their parents give them permission to call whoever they want. Moreover, they consider it acceptable that their parents use this tool to know where their children are (84% clearly accept this affirmation).
By contrast, mobile phones are strictly regulated or even forbidden in schools in all countries. Parents tend to moderately control game activity: they pay most at- tention to the time their children spend on playing (48%), than on the people their children play with (44%), and finally on the type of games their children play (28%). Examples of parental regulation seemed mostly to do with safety issues, with prohibitions applied to chat rooms and certain types of Web site. However, also common were restrictions on time of use, suggesting more general concerns about health or spread of activities. The Greek study indicated little intervention by parents except to limit costs.
There is also, importantly, wide evidence of self-regulation by young people. This includes awareness of violent and pornographic sites, sometimes in relation to con- cern about younger siblings, as in the Danish study; it may be that young people here replicate adult anxiety, adopting adult roles towards younger children. It also includes anxiety about chat rooms and concern about viruses, spam, expense (buying ring tones, for instance), and hackers. However, awareness of risk and ability to deal with it varies considerably from country to country. In France, the young people were aware of a wide range of risks, and expressed sensible, cautious attitudes, which the French study attributed to extensive and successful public information campaigns and teacher training. Similarly, in Estonia, respondents were well aware if a wide variety of risks, from communicating with strangers to the dangers of Internet shopping. By contrast, the Polish study found evidence that young people were sometimes too trusting of Web sites and in need of education to evaluate risk, while the Greek study found generally low awareness of risk.