Young people are still not sufficiently conscious of the implications of placing potentially dangerous personal data online, the Minister for Education and Science, Mary Hanafin, warned yesterday.
Jointly launching two new initiatives aimed at promoting privacy and data protection among young people, Ms Hanafin said that progress had been made on the issues of internet safety and increasing awareness. However, she said that people were also starting to use the internet at a younger age, meaning that parents at home needed to advise them about the amount of information provided to others.
"Young people increasingly are giving a lot of information about themselves on social networking sites [ such as Bebo or Facebook], purchasing on the internet, and filling in forms and getting store cards and getting union cards," she said.
"They need to know that the information they are giving can actually be used by somebody else. And that maybe they should be ticking the boxes where it says that you don't want your personal information to be given.
"I don't believe [ young people] are conscious enough and I believe that certainly all of us, and indeed parents and teachers as well, need to be constantly reminding students that by putting personal information about themselves, particularly on the internet, they are not just making it available to their own social network, their own private group of friends. In fact it is available to a much wider international audience, and for that reason it can be fun, but it can also be very dangerous."
Ms Hanafin was speaking at Newpark Comprehensive School in Blackrock, Co Dublin, where she jointly launched details of the two new initiatives alongside the Data Protection Commissioner, Billy Hawkes.
The first scheme is targeted at secondary school students and involves a new educational resource on privacy and data protection which has been produced by the office of Mr Hawkes. It has been designed for use as part of the Civic, Social and Political Education (CSPE) course, but it can also be integrated into other subjects.
The second scheme involves an online competition with a total prize fund of €10,000, whereby students are encouraged to enter a video clip on the YouTube website on the theme "privacy in the 21st century". The competition is open to individuals and groups, with entries to be posted at www.youtube.com/privacycomp