What did you find in your survey of European attitudes toward the Internet?
We interviewed 11,000 parents in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Ireland and Iceland. A total of 12 percent said they use blocking software. There's not a public outcry for filters. One of the reasons is that parents are more afraid of other things, or their concern is at other levels. The girls tend not to have any rules, because they never do anything wrong. The boys tend to get rules from their fathers, but they're general, such as, "Don't do anything stupid."
What we also found from the survey is that most parents will say they have a very good knowledge of what their kids are doing. Of course, when we spoke with children, we found that that's not true.
Are you talking about pornography? Or peer-to-peer networks and copyright infringement?
What our survey says is that kids have a very high level of conscience themselves. They have their own rules about what's acceptable and unacceptable themselves. Especially when they're 14 or 15, they feel that this is their arena, and they know what's going on. They're not so likely to listen to their parents.
At what age do children start using the Internet?
Norway has the earliest Internet adoption; Ireland the slowest. Overall, you have 34 percent starting before they're eight years old. Boys usually start when they're between five and eight years old.
What's the next big issue or concern for SAFT?
It's hard to say. One of the biggest issues we're focused on is personal information. That's usually something that's forgotten in all the discussions about pornography and chatting and meeting people online. In the United States, you have the Child Online Privacy Protection Act. We don't have that sort of thing. It's a big issue we need to focus on.
We have created a portal in each participating country. It has a list of check boxes you fill out, and it creates a legally binding claim, based on the European Data Directive, that you can send to any entity, demanding disclosure of how they treat general personal information and how to treat yours. What we're doing now is developing a program with the Norwegian Board of Education and the University of Oslo that will be implemented in the eighth grade of all Norwegian schools. All eigth graders will learn how to use the tool and generate these claims.
They can be sent to both Internet and offline companies?
Whatever. It applies offline. Anyone who stores any personal information would have to comply with these rules. The beauty of this system is that you tick off the boxes, and it generates the claim, referring to the law that says they have 30 days to comply. If you don't store any kind of personal information, you can just make an 'X' and sign the paper, and you're fine.
It's not just for kids?
It's for anyone. It's working really well. It tends to make people aware and the industry aware. It creates transparency. We also have a cookie opener that displays what information your browser leaks and a port scanner that says what services such as a peer-to-peer network client are running on your computer.
Is SAFT considering how to respond to pornographic spam?
I think that pornographic spam, as is spam in general, a problem -- and obviously extremely annoying. As we know from our research, children have at least twice as many email accounts as their parents know of. They'll have Hotmail-like accounts their parents don't know about, so it is a problem.
