BENGALURU: Understanding what personal information is safe to share online and what is not is a critical aspect of modern life. But despite that as many as 92 percent of Indian youths were found to have shared private information online, while even being aware about the risk attached to it, reports Komal Mohan of TOI.

According to Teens and Technology 2014 a report conducted by Intel's security arm McAfee, which examines online behavior and social networking habits of Indian tweens and teens. It was quite shocking to see that majority of Indian youths—as about 70 percent of them—share details like email IDs, phone numbers and home addresses on social networks and other websites freely. In addition these shocking numbers were mostly from Indian tweens ageing 8-12 years and teens ageing 13-17 years respectively.

Other interesting fact was, the number of youngsters that trust the virtual world and interact with strangers registered a big jump from 17 percent last year to 53 percent this year according to the study. However, it was said that among 51 percent of those polled were least bothered about their online privacy at all. In the same manner, these individuals did also not care about their location being shared as 63 percent of youth do not turn off their location or GPS services across apps.

Anindita Mishra, McAfee Cybermum (a title given by the company) said, "Parents must not be very strict and try to be friends with their children so that they are comfortable enough to share their problems with them."

The overall study was carried out by McAfee, which polled a total of 1,422 youngsters across seven cities, including Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad and Pune for this study.

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