On 9 February we have celebrated the 7
th edition of Safer Internet Day, under the slogan "Think before you post!". Under the coordination of INSAFE, more than 60 countries around the world have organized events aimed at empowering children and teenagers to manage their online identity in a responsible way.
On the same day, the Commission published the findings of an independent assessment of the implementation of the "Safer Social Networking Principles for the EU", a self-regulatory agreement signed in 2009 by 20 companies. The report is based on testing of these sites from a user perspective, in order to check whether minors' profiles are private by default or searchable through common search engines, as well as the possibility of changing privacy settings, blocking other users or deleting unwanted content from their profiles.
25 websites run by the signatories have been tested: Arto, Bebo, Dailymotion, Facebook, Giovani.it, YouTube (Google), Hyves, Xbox Live (Microsoft), Windows Live (Microsoft), MySpace, Nasza-klaza.pl, Netlog, One.lt, Piczo, Ratee , Skyrock, SchülerVZ (VZnet), StudiVZ (VZnet), meinVZ (VZnet), Habbo Hotel (Sulake), IRC Galleria (Sulake), Tuenti , Yahoo!Answers, Yahoo!Flickr and Zap.lu
Read the overall report
here
Read the press release
here