Social Networking and Child Safety

October is National Cyber Security Awareness month. To commemorate the occasion, the National Cyber Safety Alliance (NCSA) has released their third annual study on user behavior at social networking sites. You can view the full 2006 report as a PowerPoint on their site. Some interesting facts: 74% of social networks users have given out personal information -- varying from email addresses to Social Security numbers -- on the sites, and almost half of social networks users have browsed sites like MySpace from the workplace, opening up their office computers to the possibility of further infection from spyware or malware.

ArsTechnica and Fred Stutzman of Unit Structures have some in-depth analysis. Fred says:

The unsolicited contact stats are quite interesting, especially when broken down by age. The survey clearly shows that the younger groups are less likely to respond to unsolicited contacts. If this survey had a 13-18 age group, I'm almost certain the percentage of non-response to unsolicited contacts would be even higher than the 18-34. The notion that youths commonly respond to unsolicited contacts in social networks is clearly unfounded.

In a true Helen Lovejoy moment, the survey points to data showing that roughly half of the parents who are aware that their kids are on social networking sites don't restrict their childrens' profiles to make them viewable to trusted friends only.

Half? Is that a good thing or a bad thing?