According to Moscow-based cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Lab, children opened communication websites such as social media, messengers or emails in 61 percent of cases, compared to 67 percent in the previous 12 months (May 2015 to April 2016).
“Games have fallen to nine percent from 11 percent and adult websites now account for 1.2 percent instead of 1.5 percent,” the report found.
Meanwhile, visits to pages containing information about drugs, alcohol and tobacco now account for 14 percent of detections, though the figure was only nine percent during the previous reporting period.
Children now only use computers to visit websites that have no mobile app equivalent or that are easier to view on larger screens.
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“This may explain why the share of communication websites opened on computers is falling while the proportion of pages with ‘Alcohol, tobacco, narcotics’ content is growing,” said Anna Larkina, Web-content Analysis Expert at Kaspersky Lab.
The decrease in the share of games doesn’t mean children are playing computer games less; they tend to choose a few sites and stick to them, but can spend a lot of time playing them.
The report also stated that the chattiest children live in the Arab world where 89 percent of detections were related to communication websites. North American kids use computers for this purpose least of all – just 28 percent of cases.
“Sites about narcotics, alcohol and tobacco are most popular in North America (32 percent), Oceania (30 percent) and Western Europe (26 percent), while children from the Arab world are least likely to open these sites – just three percent of cases,” the report noted.
The computer games category is most popular in North America (20 percent), Oceania (20 percent), Western Europe (18 percent) and least popular in the Arab world (two percent).
-IANS
