Youngsters warned over dangers of 'sexting'

A worrying 88 percent of home made pornography ends up for public view on the Internet, it has been revealed.

Video and still images, usually made by couples under the strict understanding it is for their eyes only, are available online without the owners’ knowledge.

The study by Britain’s Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) analyzed more than 12,000 explicit images uploaded by young people and found that the great majority had been stolen.

The material is gathered from a range of sources including lost or stolen cellphones, hacked private accounts on sites such as Photobucket, Flickr, or Facebook.

Susie Hargreaves, CEO of the Internet Watch Foundation, told the Guardian newspaper: “We need young people to realize that once an image or a video has gone online, they may never be able to remove it entirely.

“Once an image has been copied on to a parasite website, it will no longer suffice to simply remove the image from the online account.”

A study in American schools found that close to a third of teenagers had sent a nude picture of themselves, and 57 percent had been asked to.

Teenagers who engaged in 'sexting' were also more likely to have sex.

Researchers claim that 'sexting' via email or text has become a modern version of “You show me mine, I'll show me yours.”

The study taken earlier this year questioned 1,000 students at seven schools in southeast Texas.

It found that 28 percent of adolescents have sent a nude pictures of themselves through electronic means; more than half (57 percent) have been asked to send a nude picture; and about one-third (31 percent) have asked for a nude picture to be sent to them.

These rates are substantially higher than recently published peer-reviewed data suggesting that only a little more than one percent of teens had sent naked pictures.(Daily Mail)