As it's Safer Internet Day on February 8, I point you to testing done on an EU study on parental control programs for children.These are not programs to control parents of course, though some children might wish they could. These instead filter out porn, violence and other content parents do not want their children to access over the Internet.On behalf of the EU Kids Online initiative, Innova looked at 31 programs used to filter content on personal computers, mobile phones and game consoles. The good news: about 84 percent of the 26 tested for personal computers enabled parents to block access to certain websites.The bad: in general all the tools are pretty ineffectual. About 20 percent of harmful content is not filtered by all the tested software. They all perform similarly when configured for two age classes, those less than or 10 years old and those older than 11 years, so such functionality does not work.They all are less efficient at filtering Web 2.0 content such as social networking sites or blogs. All found it easier to filter adult content compared to other categories, like those that advocate suicide, racism or violence.And only a few of the assessed programs were able to filter web content accessed via mobile phones or game consoles. This is important, as one child out of four in Europe now goes online in this way.Another sad statistic: only a quarter of the EU's parents use control software to monitor, track or filter what their children can do online.Perhaps many parents may say they do not want to censor their children, or they say their children will go elsewhere to use the Internet if he or she finds out they are being blocked at home. Filtering software can also slow a connection down considerably. For myself, I guess even being able to filter most of the unwanted content, especially porn, out is better than having no filter at all. However, I don't think I would use it to filter the Internet for an 11-year-old. At that age, I would have to use my parental authority and hopefully my child would listen, or explain the kind of people that are writing hateful things. But others may have other and better views on this.At least about 70 percent of parents surveyed said that they talk to their children about what they do on the Internet. About 58 percent claim they stay nearby their children while they use the Internet.You can download the report from www.eukidsonline.net. Better yet, you can rank all the tested software according to your needs at www.yprt.eu/sip. Reviews monitoring progress will be done every six months until the end of 2012.Parents will be interested in a separate report for the same programme, which surveyed 25,000 children aged 9-16 to find out how they used the Internet. It found 85 percent used it for school work, 83% for games, 76% for watching video clips, and 62 percent for messages. Posting images, sharing messages, webcamming, file-sharing and blogging range from 39 percent to 11 percent. About 59 percent have a social networking profile.About 93% go online at least weekly, with 63 percent of those surveyed doing it daily. So the Internet is embedded in their daily lives. A third of those surveyed say “I know more about the Internet than my parents”, but I would guess they might say that about almost everything at that age!On another note, here's a headline that provides a harsh lesson in why you should always back up your computer: “The cure for cancer may have been lost in a stolen laptop”. Actually the CNet.com headline was “Stolen laptop contains cancer cure data”, which is a much more responsible one.The story is of university research Sook Shin, who claims she had a few years worth of data related to a possible cure for prostate cancer stolen along with her laptop. She did not back up, and says “some of her research can never be retrieved, while other parts could take up to two years to replicate”.As Cnet says: “Dude, you got to back up your data!”Send any comments to elamin.ahmed[AT]gmail.com.