Parents in the European Union are heavy users of parental control software for their children’s Internet access, a news study commissioned by the European Union reports. 59% of European parents with a child in the home had either filtering or monitoring software installed, while just 31% had neither. The full report is here. The chart by country below is very interesting:
Half of the parents – with a child who accessed the Internet at home – responded that they had installed filtering software on the computer that their child used at home. Monitoring software was not so popular, but was still used by almost four out of 10 parents (37%). In total, slightly more than a quarter of the parents (27%) said they used both filtering and monitoring software.
Three out of 10 parents said they did not have filtering or monitoring software on their home computer, and another 11% said they did not know if such software was installed.
There was considerable variation across countries in the use of such software. More than half of the British parents (52%) answered that they had installed both monitoring and filtering software on the computer that their child used at home, compared to only 5% of the parents in Romania and Bulgaria. In Romania – and in Lithuania and Portugal – approximately six out of 10 parents said they did not have filtering or monitoring software on their home computer. In Bulgaria – and in Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Malta – more than one-fifth of parents did not know if such software was installed on their home computer (between 22% an 26%). In all countries, except Slovenia, filtering software was more popular than that used for monitoring. For example, less than one-sixth of the parents in Italy (16%) had installed monitoring software – either on its own or alongside filtering software – on the computer that their child used at home, while almost three times as many parents had a filter installed (48%). In Slovenia, on the other hand, 37% of the parents had installed monitoring software, but only a quarter (25%) used filtering software – either on its own or alongside monitoring software.
– David Burt
Filed under: Filtering, Internet Safety, Research
Good for European parents for taking an active role in protecting their children from what could be a very dangerous world for them… the internet. I hope that U.S parents are following this same trend!
With porn, gambling, and hate sites on the rise, it’s encouraging to see that adults are actively trying to maintain a computer “safe zone” for their kids.
Part of the reason for this renewed interest is due to easier to use, more capable internet filtering systems. But more importantly, I think that parents are starting to get a better grasp on what’s going on in cyberspace themselves- and bringing that knowledge home with them.
[...] compared to the use of filtering by parents in the U.S.(55%) and Europe (59 %) 33 % may seem low, but keep in mind this is something new, mobile devices, so for an initial [...]