Online Safety UK

96% of young people in the UK regularly use the Internet to communicate according to a survey of 24,000 British people aged 9-11. The report shows that only 40% of young people know that personal information shared online stays online forever. There are about 250 million tweets generated every day and around 800 million Facebook users - that means a lot of information is shared online. So are young people using the Internet safely?

Private or public: Do you know how to change your privacy settings on social media? For example, you can click on the ‘flower’ icon or on ‘settings’ on Facebook to get to your privacy settings. Then you can decide who sees your posts and personal information: friends, friends of friends or everyone. Do you want everyone in the world to be able to see your email address or just friends? The BBC Share Take Care campaign is all about helping everybody, from little kids to the over 55s, to make their online activity safer and protect themselves on the web. The campaign says adults and teenagers need to be more careful with personal information and images online. An online security expert from the BBC was given only the names and the home town of two pairs of mothers and daughters in the UK and then he searched online for information that they had shared in social media. One mother and daughter pair are keen Twitter users. They had frequent personal Twitter chats that they thought were private but were in fact public! Now they both know that Twitter has a private messaging function and their chats really are private. The other mother was very embarrassed when the security expert showed her a picture of her partner in his underpants! She had forgotten about posting the photograph and quickly removed it. The security expert also found lots of their personal details like dates of birth, addresses, maiden names, football teams and pop stars. Nothing embarrassing, but potentially useful information for a cyber criminal.