nonblogger.

Special ‘Duh!’ Report -

Parents have a lot to learn when it comes to their children’s behaviors online, the research found. In addition to significantly underestimating the amount of time their teens spend checking in on social networking sites, nearly half of parents (49%) say their child was age 13 or older before starting unsupervised surfing. This compares with just 14% of teens who say they actually waited this long.

Quoted in Marketing Charts, a study by Common Sense Media found that the parents of teens greatly underestimate their teens’ involvement with social networks.

Some teens also are attempting to keep their social networking businesses secret from their parents. 12% of teens with Facebook or MySpace pages say their parents don’t know about the account, 28% have shared information they would not normally share in public (16%of parents think their children have) and 13% have posted naked or semi-naked images of themselves (only 2% of parents think their children have).

A report in the New York Times reveals that at least two media companies are tracking the connections between Facebook Friends – all the better to serve up targeted marketing to the friends of folks who are already customers.

33Across and Media6Degrees, are analyzing such connections, and they are not interested in basic friend lists, but in interactions on the sites, taking note when a user visits a friend’s page, sends a video or exchanges an instant message. In turn, they can identify people who are friends with a company’s existing customers, and then advertise to them…
According to Eric Wheeler, the chief executive of 33Across, instead of understanding all these things about people, you could understand who was connected to who – “the reality is, those people are very similar not only in socioeconomic terms, but in terms of what they click and buy, so it’s very valuable.”