According to a research conducted by the Internet Development Fund, children in Europe and the NIS states usually know more about the Internet than their parents do.

From the one hand, this is a positive and logical thing. From the other hand – we don’t really know how children understand the basics of online security. Regular incidents involving Internet fraud and harassment prove that the problem is very real and the level of online threat awareness among teenagers is very low.

You can try to shield your kids from such threats in many ways, but you must be ready to face the fact that an Internet-savvy teenager won’t have any problems finding a workaround. And that is why you, as a parent, will have to explain the basics of online security to them.

Google has published a guide for parents and teachers that explains how online dangers can be avoided and how the rules of online conduct can be efficiently communicated to minors. All of these materials have been published as “Family Safety Center”.

The guide contains articles written by Google and other companies working on the problems of online security for children.

However, we should not forget than no technology, even the most advanced one, will ever be able to replace parental control and proper upbringing.

Google has developed an algorithm that determines who is using the computer at any given moment — a child or a grown-up.

To do that, the system monitors the user’s actions, analyzes the browsing history and the sites loaded in the browser. The algorithm already demonstrated reliable results in a series of tests, which enabled Google to register an official patent with the US Patent and Trademark Office.

The author of the algorithm, Krishna Bharat, is the head of Google’s research facility in Bangalore, India, and the lead developer of the Google News service. He is also a co-author of another similar patent describing an algorithm for determining the age, literacy and income levels, as well as the ethnicity of a user.

Google is one of the largest internet companies who, in the process of collecting data for its Google Street View service became embroiled in a scandal related to personal data security. Data for this service is collected by cars, installed with special equipment, which drive around city streets.

The scandal began in Germany, whose inhabitants pay rather close attention to their personal information security. They expressed their concern regarding the possible appearance of people, numbers of houses and cars on Street View. Following their demands this data was removed, almost 250 thousand houses disappeared from the service’s database.

The second strand of the scandal began when it was discovered that Google cars accidentally connect to all wireless networks that they encounter and collect some information. Google management confirmed the interception, but described it as an accident. Code from a different program was included, apparently by mistake, in the car antenna algorithm. Meanwhile, the volume of information captured from other Wi-Fi networks was almost 600 gigabytes (a quarter of networks in European towns are completely unsecured).

At the moment, public organisations in more than 30 countries are demanding that the internet company be charged with breaking laws on information security.

In order to help defuse this conflict, Google promised to delete collected data and also appointed Alma Whitten as Director of Privacy to protect the interests of users and their personal data.