Students' and Parents' Attitudes towards Online Privacy: An International Study

Young internet users engage in risky or inappropriate behavior, including sending email and texts about their sexual activities and the sexual activities of others, and other activities that could either be embarrassing or harmful to their future. Parents in all eight countries studied express preferences for far less data mining of students' online activities than seems to be the current practice. Most importantly, aversion to data mining does not seem to be correlated with awareness of the extent to which data mining of teen's activities occurs or the variety of forms that this data mining can exhibit. Only in the U.S. Does teens' aversion to an activity appear to be correlated with their individually engaging in that activity, and this appears to be true only for the most embarrassing or incriminating of online activities.