50% of European teenagers give out personal information on the web – according to an EU study – which can remain online forever and can be seen by anybody. Today, Safer Internet Day, the European Commission is passing a message to teenagers: "Think before you post!"

At 2009 Safer Internet Day social networking companies recognised the need for young users – and their parents – to feel safe when socialising online and signed the Safer Social Networking Principles. These resulted from discussions set up by the European Commission in April 2008 with social networking sites, NGOs and researchers. 18 companies signed the Safer Social Networking Principles in February 2009 and were joined by another two in June 2009.

One year on, the Commission has published a report on the implementation of the Principles on the 25 sites run by the signatories – Arto, Bebo, Dailymotion, Facebook, Giovani.it, YouTube, Hyves, Windows Live, Xboxlive, Myspace, Nasza-klaza.pl, Netlog, One.lt, Piczo, Rate.ee, Skyrock, SchülerVZ StudiVZ MeinVZ, Habbo, IRC Galleria, Tuenti, Yahoo!Answers, Flickr, and Zap.lu.

Findings show that 19 out of 23 sites provide safety tips and information specifically targeted towards children and/or teenagers (this measure is non applicable for 2 services). This information is both easy to find and easy to understand on 14 sites.

The report also shows that most of the companies empower minors to deal with potential online risks and employ a safe approach to privacy by:

• Making it easy for users to block other users and remove comments from their profiles
• Making privacy options easy to change so that users can choose whether only their friends or the entire world can see what they post online
• Giving users control over the display of their online status (which allows other users to see whether they are online or not).

However, there has been less systematic implementation of other equally important measures designed to protect privacy:

• 40% of social networking sites assessed make minors’ personal information visible only by their friends by default.
• Only 11 out of 22 make it impossible for the private profiles of minors to be found through search engines.
• While 19 sites out of 25 have a link for reports available at all times, only 9 (out of 22) responded to complaints submitted during the assessment. There is therefore an urgent need for better services to respond to users' reports asking for help.

Background

On February 18th 2009, 18 leading web firms signed a European agreement brokered by the Commission to improve the safety of under-18s who use social networking sites. Two more signatories joined the agreement in 2009. All signatories, except Giovani.it, provided their self-declarations to the European Commission by June 2009. The evaluation report of implementation of the Safer Social Networking Principles presented today is based on an analysis of the companies' self-declarations and actual testing of the respective sites from end of October to beginning of November 2009.

The INSAFE network  that coordinates the participation of EU and third countries in Safer Internet Day 2010 has been established by the Commission's EU Safer Internet Programme to raise awareness of online uses and risks while addressing children, parents, schools, and media.

With this aim, the European Commission put forward in December 2008 the Safer Internet Programme in order to promote safer use of the Internet and other communication technologies, especially by children. This Programme will run from 2009 to 2013.