Brussels, 10/11/2011 (Agence Europe) - ENISA, (European Network and Information Security Agency) published a report on 9 November on cyber-bullying and online grooming (where an adult gains the confidence of a child in preparation for sexual abuse). The report warns that misuse of data (data mining and profiling) harms minors and sets out 18 recommendations for competent authorities.
With young people spending increasing amounts of time online and on social networking sites, ENISA is concerned about the impact on their school performance and social skills.
It sets out 18 recommendations, advocating, for example, “strengthening of law enforcement agencies by the member states: additional knowledge and resources is important. This additional strength is needed to properly cover regulatory issues, statistical data collection of misuse cases, and follow up on privacy breaches”, a press release states. Sponsored online campaigns to prevent grooming/cyber bullying should be conducted on social networks. Similarly, parents/guardians/educators need to be provided with better technological skills to overcome the knowledge gap between adults and teenagers.
ENISA makes a number of recommendations for teenagers: - use of specialised teenager security settings, and adaptation of existing ones to teenager needs; - privacy impact assessment for applications processing teenager's data; - development of mechanisms to allow deactivation of all active (online) components; - age-oriented access control mechanisms. (SP/transl.rt)