No Turning Back

games and software was patently illegal and an infringement of copy-
right laws, but the practice was at this time restricted to a very small
number of users. It was regarded by manufacturers as an irritation,
but not a terminal problem. The overwhelming majority of games were
bought perfectly legally in stores or from sites like Amazon.

Matrix did not conceal his activity from his parents out of concern
that he might be infringing intellectual property laws. No - the most
wonderful thing about the Internet for teenagers, he realised, was that
your parents would never (and in most cases can never) have the
slightest notion of what you are doing. It was tough enough for parents
to keep track of which DVDs were entering or leaving a house. But at
least DVDs were physical objects that a mother or father could confis-
cate, should they find their thirteen-year-old watching an X-rated movie
(always at the risk, of course, of provoking a tedious temper tantrum).

The Internet was changing all that. Children were growing up in a
cyber environment which to them was self-explanatory and normal,
but which parents found increasingly mystifying and treacherous to
navigate. Teenagers were perfectly aware that their parents were at
cybersea in this same environment. This in turn started to reinforce a
sense that the Web was an area of their young lives from which parents
could legitimately be banned. How many mothers and fathers have
walked into a room and observed their teens minimising their Internet
browser as their cheeks flush briefly? And if parents so much as glance
at a Facebook page, even when the kids are accessing it in a public
room, the child is transformed into a human-rights activist, accusing
the beleaguered carer of acting like a Gestapo officer.

What many children and teenagers were less aware of was how,
while they were able to pull the wool over their parents' eyes, there
were all sorts of people less easily fooled - and whose numbers were
growing. These might include stalkers, advertisers, bullies, groomers,
police, teachers and criminals. Only the most sophisticated users are
able to cover up what they are actually doing on the Web.

In contrast to long-suffering parents, these other interested parties
with a modicum of computer literacy were starting to track digital
footprints that children and teenagers were beginning to leave over
many years. Such records habitually included admissions of drug-taking
and alcoholic binges, the insulting of teachers, the bullying of class-
mates and, increasingly, the posting of pornographic self-portraits.