The Internet is catching them real young. At a time when privacy issues are being widely debated, a survey in the US has found that 92 percent of children in the country have some type of online presence by the time they are two years old.
Corresponding figures for the European too are high. Seventy-three percent of parents in the United Kingdom, Spain, France, Germany, and Italy said they have been sharing images of their infants online.
The study, conducted by Internet security company AVG, surveyed 2,200 mothers with young children in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan during the week of September 27.
American parents, according to the study, are more likely to share baby pictures and information online than parents from other countries in the survey. In fact, a third of US mothers posted pictures of newborns, and 34 percent said they had posted sonograms of their as-yet unborn child.
The survey found that 7 percent of babies and toddlers have an email address created for them by their parents, and five percent have a social network profile.
AVG Chief Executive JR Smith voiced his concern at the findings, "it's completely understandable why proud parents would want to upload and share images of very young children with friends and families," but he urged parents to remember that they are "creating a digital history for a human being that will follow him or her for the rest of their life."
