Online privacy: 95% of parents don’t trust social media

95.3% of parents do not consider it acceptable that their children just need to be 13 years old to join a social network without their approval. Indeed, in 68.5% of cases they would consider it right to wait until they are 16 years old to allow it, while 26.8% are in line with the provision of the Italian Privacy Code, which requires that to give their consent for the processing of personal data you must be 14 years old.

To highlight these concerns is the last poll carried out by the Federprivacy Observatory with the support of its delegates from 107 Italian provinces.

Even if the intervention of the Guarantor on Tik Tok and the information campaign of the authority to raise awareness among parents represent an important first step for the protection of minors online, the fact remains that at present social networks do not enjoy enough trust to let the very young access it on their own, and Nicola Bernardi, president of Federprivacy, explains the reasons:

“On the internet we find a wide range of apparently free services, and to the most vulnerable subjects such as children this can seem like a sort of toy land, but not all that glitters is gold, because often when we sign up for a social network we pay with our personal data, which are often exploited indiscriminately for marketing and other opaque purposes that cannot fully understand even a mature adult who takes the trouble to read the very long and complicated privacy policies. This lack of transparency ends up undermining not only the trust of parents, but that of all users, penalizing the development of the digital market “.

In fact, the scenario of the web is not too reassuring for the well-being of minors, as it is also a recent research Federprivacy had already highlighted that 93.8% of apps aimed at children contain trackers that spy on them and almost half of these transfer data to countries that are not safe for privacy, but in 87% of cases the contacts of a Data Protection Officer that a parent would have the right to contact to protect their child.

Editorial responsibility:
Federprivacy