Kids on the Web in 2021: Infinite creativity

[harlan4096]

For over a year we’ve been living in a world gripped by the COVID-19 pandemic. Not only has the pandemic affected people’s lifestyles, it has also accelerated the development and implementation of technologies that make it easier for us to complete everyday and work-related tasks. We no longer need to fly halfway around the world to attend a conference. Nor do we need to leave the house to buy things like food or household cleaning products. Children can now attend school remotely, and more and more adults are getting used to working from home. We do not know how much longer we will be living like this or what life will look like after the pandemic. But one thing is clear: no matter what happens, people are unlikely to give up existing technologies.

Children master new technologies and are adapting to the digital society faster than adults. In fact, they are the digital society. In this report we try to understand what occupied the younger generation during the last year, from May 2020 to April 2021 inclusive. We will see what children were engrossed in during their leisure time when they were fixated on their smartphones, how and where they tapped into their creativity, what they were listening to and who their favorite YouTube blogger was. At the same time, we will try to remember what we were like at their age and understand that in essence, they are passionate about the same things we were, only in a new, digital form.

How we collect our statisticsWebsite categorization

Kaspersky Safe Kids module included into our solutions for home users scans the contents of web pages that children try to visit. If the site falls into one of 14 undesirable categories, the product sends an alert to Kaspersky Security Network. In doing so, no personal data is transmitted and user privacy is not violated. Note:

• It is up to the parent to decide which content to block by tweaking the protective solution’s preferences. However, anonymous statistics are collected for all the 14 categories.
  
• The information in this report was obtained from computers running Windows and macOS.
  

Web filtering in Kaspersky Safe Kids currently covers the following categories:

• Software, audio, video
  
• Internet communication
  
• Videogames
  
• Online-stores, banks, payment systems
  
• News media
  
• Job search
  
• Adult content
  
• Profanity, obscenity
  
• Weapons, explosives, pyrotechnics
  
• Religions, religious associations
  
• Gambling, lotteries, sweepstakes
  
• Alcohol, tobacco, narcotics
  
• Anonymizers
  
• Violence
  

Search query filtering

Looking at children’s search activity is the best way to see what they are interested in. Kaspersky Safe Kids can filter kids’ queries in five search engines (Bing, Google, Mail.ru, Yahoo!, Yandex), as well as on YouTube. Filtering targets six potentially dangerous topics: Adult content, Alcohol, Narcotics, Tobacco, Racism and Profanity.

This report presents statistics on YouTube searches. The TOP 1,000 search queries collected from YouTube over the period from November 2020 to April 2021, inclusive, was taken as 100%. The ranking was based on the number of times a query was input, without breakdown by region or language. The popularity of a topic is determined by its share of related queries.

We divided the search queries collected from November 2020 to April 2021 into the following subject categories:

• Games
  
• YouTube bloggers
  
• Music
  
• Movies, cartoons and TV shows
  
• Trends
  
• Gacha Life
  
• Hobbies and creation
  
• Memes
  
• Anime
  
• TikTok
  
• Sports
  
• Toys
  
• Adult content
  
• Educational content
  
• Miscellaneous
  

Control the use of programs

Kaspersky Safe Kids allows parents to control and limit the amount of time their children spend on apps and programs on their devices. This study draws on anonymized data on the number of hours children spent on apps on devices running the Android operating system in different regions and countries, as well as in the world as a whole.

We determined the 10 most popular apps for each of the regions and countries we examined, as well as for the entire world. For each set of 10, we took as 100% the sum of the hours spent on these apps. The percentage breakdown in the TOP 10 reflects the number of hours spent on each app.
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