As children we’re taught not to talk to strangers.  However, the following statistics paint a picture of a generation of teenagers growing up, online, doing just that.   The solution to this problem is education and better online security tools like MSWatchdog provides.

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93% of US teens (12-to-17-year-olds) are online. Up 20 percentage points from 2000. The majority of teenagers who go online maintain one or more profiles at social-networking Web sites. - Source: Pew Internet

Nearly two-thirds of teens with profiles (63%) believe that a motivated person could eventually identify them from the information they publicly provide on their profiles. - Source: Pew Internet

Content creation by teenagers continues to grow, with 64% of online teenagers ages 12 to 17 engaging in at least one type of content creation, up from 57% of online teens in 2004. - Source: Pew Internet

Girls continue to dominate most elements of content creation. Some 35% of all teen girls blog, compared with 20% of online boys, and 54% of wired girls post photos online compared with 40% of online boys. Boys, however, do dominate one area - posting of video content online. Online teen boys are nearly twice as likely as online girls (19% vs. 10%) to have posted a video online somewhere where someone else could see it. - Pew Internet

Parents today are less likely to say that the internet has been a good thing for their children than they were in 2004. - Source: Pew Internet

Fully 32% of online teens have been contacted by someone with no connection to them or any of their friends, and 7% of online teens say they have felt scared or uncomfortable as a result of contact by an online stranger. Several behaviors are associated with high levels of online stranger contact, including social networking profile ownership, posting photos online and using social networking sites to flirt. Although several factors are linked with increased levels of stranger contact in general, gender is the only variable with a consistent association with contact that is scary or uncomfortable–girls are much more likely to report scary or uncomfortable contact than boys. - Source: Pew Internet

SOURCES:
Pew Internet