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SALT LAKE CITY -- The summer's almost over, but do you know what your children were looking at online? A list of their top Internet searches may surprise you. But it should be taken with a grain of salt.
OnlineFamily.Norton says its top 10 list of searches by children includes Facebook, eBay, Michael Jackson and "Fred." Parents now may be asking, "Who's Fred?"
"He's just a very popular kid on YouTube, and he has his own channel and gets millions of visits. He sort of has a gimmick, and kids are kind of fascinated by Fred," says Anne Collier, the co-director of Connectsafely.org and editor of NetFamilynews.org.
Collier says it's not surprising to see MySpace and Facebook on the top 10 list.
"Kids are the drivers of the social web, whether it's on phones or it's on computers. They just love social media, whether it's sharing videos, producing videos or watching videos," she said.
But the other searches in the top 10 may surprise some parents--sex and porn made the list.
"Kids developmentally have a certain curiosity about sex and certain body parts," Collier said.
But she also says the kids involved in the Norton survey knew their habits were being watched, so they may have searched for those terms on purpose.
"Kids like to test systems. If they are being monitored with a monitoring product like this, they might just be plunking in sex or porn to see if it's really going to catch them," she said.
E-mail: mrichards@ksl.com
