IT is every parent's nightmare. We saw it in the news a few weeks ago – a 15-year-old girl runs off to France with a 49-year-old she met on the internet. The reality is that this generation is growing up with internet access in the classroom, the living room and the bedroom and are now conducting their social lives online.
Guidance is available on how to encourage responsible use if you look hard enough, but surely there is also a legal framework in place to make the companies offering these online services protect youngsters on-line? Not as much as you might think.
In January we saw the Online Age Verification Bill, presented to parliament demanding that the provision of "age restricted" goods and services is dealt with as rigorously in the virtual world as it is in the real world. When the Bill was originally raised in Parliament last year, it was dropped with little chance of becoming law. With incidents of children having inappropriate experiences online on the increase, perhaps this time the Bill has a better chance of succeeding. Here's hoping. But where does this leave concerned parents just now?
At the moment there is no regulation specifically designed to cope with social networking. The closest we have to appropriate law is the Data Protection Act 1998 and the guidance of the Information Commissioner's Office, the body responsible for enforcing the Act.
This guidance says that any website targeted at under-16s should get "verifiable parental consent" before any information about a child is published online. "Verifiable" consent means getting parents to sign a consent form and checking the details on this before information can be published.
To be fair, this paper-based process does not seem particularly commercial or realistic these days and it is understandable why certain websites do not comply with this cumbersome process. But it surely still isn't right that, more often than not, websites pay lip service to the issue of underage use but do nothing pro-active to verify the age of their users. For example Facebook, the world's most popular social networking site, simply advises that under-18s ask their parents for permission before sending any information.
The result of this is that we don't know what our kids are doing online and the lack of concrete legal obligations makes it difficult for website providers to clearly understand what they need to do.
Until the law gets its act together and makes it illegal for websites to allow under-16s to use social networking sites without some form of parental consent or supervision, the advice to parents from the Home Office is to strike a balance between keeping an eye on children and trusting them online. It also recommends stressing that people they meet online may lie about who they are and highlighting the danger of meeting up with them.
To help concerned parents, there are now "online age verification" services available from sites such as 192.com and netidme, which will do the background checking against official documents and issue an "age verification certificate" to users. This is undoubtedly the future of the online marketplace, but at the moment most social networking providers do not require "age certificates". Why? Because they don't have to – anything that might deter use of the site has an impact on revenue.
It is now two years since the ICO last published its guidance on "Protecting Children's Personal Information". With no sign of the social networking hype waning, perhaps it is time the ICO voiced a new opinion in support of the proposed Bill to give websites clear guidance on their responsibilities and to take the burden off parents.
• Helena Brown is an associate with commercial law firm Burness, 50 Lothian Road, Edinburgh. 