Sprinkled with figures that pass for statistics, Bulgarian officials and non-governmental organisations attempted to out-do one another in advice on how to be safe online on the occasion of international Safer Internet Day, February 9.

The 110 registered social network sites - more often dating sites than anything else - in Bulgaria, a country of seven million with an internet penetration of 40 per cent, were said to have about 2.7 million registered users, of which 800 000 were reported to be minors.
How many minors had more than one registration on at least one of these websites, was left unmentioned.

In a different set of unrelated statistics, Bulgarian news agency BTA quoted officials as saying that 40 per cent of Bulgarian minors had met in real life, at least once, with someone they had met online.

From these statistics, it was "clear that self-defence and awareness of Bulgarian children were extremely low," Safer Internet programme co-ordinator in Bulgaria Georgi Apostolov was quoted as saying, referring to statistics for the rest of Europe where, on average, between 20 and 30 per cent of minors were said to have met in real life with someone they had met online.

Yet another set of statistics, quoted by Apostolov, said that the Bulgarian Bulgarian Safer Internet Hotline, web112.net, had received a total of 1200 tip-offs. These 1200 tip-offs had led to more than 300 "actions," Apostolov was quoted by BTA as saying, of which a total of 40 had resulted in formal complaints filed with law enforcement authorities.

No figures on the number of sentences passed were presented, nor on the reason why the other 96.7 per cent of tip-offs had not resulted in formal complaints.

The Transport Ministry, which includes the communications portfolio, announced that it had published a set of rules online to guide minors in their use of social websites.

The rules ranged from "always warn authorities about possible dangerous content or people online," to "fully trust parents and law enforcement authorities when you have become the target of online abuse," and "never go out to meet someone in real life that you have met online without the accompaniment of an adult."

The Safer Internet Programme and Yavor Kolev, head of the Computer Crime Devision of Bulgaria's organised crime fighters CDCOC, agreed that there was an "urgent need to introduce a public register of paedophiles." The register would serve "so parents know which paedophiles live in their neighbourhood," Bulgarian-language daily Novinar said.

In the same breath with the warnings about the dangers of paedophiles lurking online, Kolev warned of fraudulent and so-called phishing sites; websites set up with the intention to collect personal data of visitors.

According to Kolev, a recent scheme in Bulgaria was for sites to sent out spam emails with commercial offers. Once visitors visited the sites that these emails linked to, there would be nothing there, but the site would have collected all the necessary private data and an "order" would be shipped COD to the unsuspecting visitor.

"The bad thing is that most people do not even know they are under no obligation to accept the COD shipment," Kolev was quoted as saying.

In order to know whether or not a banking website was the official website, users should look for "the icon that looked like a padlock," BTA quoted Kolev as saying.

Ognyan Kiryakov, managing director for Microsoft Bulgaria, concluded that the "internet forms an online word where all the dangers of the real world lurk."

Europe-wide research by Microsoft had shown that almost 80 per cent of children exclusively used social networks as their means of communication, and many did not even use email any more.

There was a time when parents would proudly announce at birthday parties that they left programming the VCR up to their offspring, as they were the only ones who seemed to understand these machines.Reports have long shown that the generation that has grown up with mostly online contacts has more social contacts of a wider variety than previous generations.

Looking at the advice dished out on the occasion of Safer Internet Day by Bulgarian officials, the online generation seems more and more left to fend for themselves, having no one else to turn to for sensible advice but their (online) friends.