Half of Kiwi parents snoop on their kids’ email, website history

More than half of parents snoop on their kids’ email or check their history of visited websites, according to a survey of 1000 New Zealanders by Colmar Brunton, carried out for Symantec.

The poll, part of a wider international survey called The Norton Online Living report, also found that 50% of New Zealand parents set parental controls of their children’s’ surfing.

That compares to a global average of 33% and rating higher than those in Australia (34%), the US (32%), Italy (30%), China (27%), Sweden (22%) and Japan (18%). Only UK (54%) and Canadian parents (52%) set more controls on their family computers.

Our nosiness has had limited pay-off. Only 23% of Kiwi parents have “caught their child or children doing something online that they do not approve”, against an NBR estimate that 100% of children occasionally or everyday seek out content unlikely to receive parental approval.

Straining credulity, survey also claims that New Zealand adults spend an average of three hours a week txting. At 30 seconds a txt (remembering adults thumb more slowly than teens), that would still mean each of us sends 360 txts a week. Your correspondent sends about five, so someone, somewhere is ferociously thumbing to bring up the average.

Australians apparently spend 2.5 hours a week on txt, people in the UK two hours, people in China 3.9 and Indians four hours a week.

And seemingly out of sync with the reality of a TradeMe-obsessed, Facebooking, wired office nation, the Norton report also reckons that the average New Zealand adult spends just 12.7 hours a week online.

In the survey’s 12 countries as a whole (it also took in the US, Canada, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, China, Japan, India, Australia and Brazil, the average was a more real-life sounding 26.3 hours.