Indian parents are very worried about their children's online security: Report

A recently published report by Norton by Symantec indicates that Indian parents are more worried about their children than the rest of the world. The Norton Cyber Security Insights Report is a report commissioned by Norton by Symantec and this year’s report included inputs from over 17,000 device users across 17 countries. Included are over 1,000 Indian parents. Figures from the report indicate that 1 in 3 Indian parents are worried about cyber-bullying, and that at least half of the participating parents reported that they felt that their kids were safer from bullies on the playground than online. This is expected and understandable, given the nature of the Internet. We’ll let Norton’s slides do the talking for a bit. [caption id=“attachment_304314” align=“aligncenter” width=“640”]  92% of parents are worried about their children’s security[/caption] [caption id=“attachment_304315” align=“aligncenter” width=“640”]  It’s not surprising that Indian parents are more worried about their kids[/caption] [caption id=“attachment_304316” align=“aligncenter” width=“640”]  Their children downloading a virus is apparently the greatest fear. Sadly, there are far more dangerous things (and people) online[/caption] It couldn’t be more obvious that parents are concerned about their children’s well-being online, and as is apparent from the report, Indian parents are more likely to do something about that. On speaking to Ritesh Chopra, Country Manager, India, Norton by Symantec, he pointed out that while Indian parents do indeed want to limit their children’s activities online, in the present digital age, it’s almost impossible. There really isn’t much that parents can do other than educate their children about the dangers of the online world and have an open dialogue with them about the same. “In the last year Norton has seen the online safety awareness levels of Indian parents increase rapidly as technology firmly cements itself in the family home," said Ritesh. He added that many parents perceived their children to be the greatest threat to their cyber-security, and rightly so. In addition to educating their children and having an open dialogue, Norton recommends using third-party services such as Norton’s own Norton Family suite of parental control technologies. Speaking about the service, Ritesh tells us that the service will allow parents to monitor their child’s online activities at all times, if they so desire. The services will also let parents limit search keywords and generally provide access to a safer Internet. The Norton Family kit is available for iOS (limited to a Parent Companion app, and that too in select countries), Android (Android 4.0.3 upwards) and PC. Given iOS’s restrictions as an OS, this is to be expected. That said, iOS does offer fine-grained control over iTunes purchases and content, so make sure you’ve at least got those set up. In the interest of impartiality, we’d like to point out that Norton by Symantec isn’t the only company offering parental control services. Kaspersky, Avast and BitDefender, among others, also offer parental control services at various price points and with varied feature sets. Choose wisely.