A new breed of social media websites is leaving young people open to cyber bullying, with anonymous users able to bombard others with sexually explicit messages and demands.

The anonymity provided by the sites has made them a hotbed for sexual pressure, bullying and abuse.

Despite little mainstream media coverage, “question and answer” websites such as ask.fm, qooh.me and formspring.me have exploded in popularity

Increasingly, Internet companies are pushing each other to prove to consumers that their data is safe and in their control.

In some instances, established companies are trying to gain market advantage by casting themselves as more privacy-friendly than their rivals.

“It’s not just privacy advocates and regulators pushing,” Mr. Lynch said. “Increasingly, people are concerned more about privacy as technology intersects their life.”

However, a severe downside is the challenge to data security and personal privacy. The internet is now overrun with cyber attacks and hackers. Internet security has become a very serious and common concern for the entire world.

Recently the American company Mandiant published a report on cyber security. This report accuses China of being the origin of most cyber attacks and portrays China as an arch-hacker.

Cyber attacks by nature are transnational, anonymous and deceptive. It is extremely difficult to ascertain the source of any attack. Cyber attacks launched from stolen or faked IP addresses take place around the world on daily basis.

The Government yesterday launched a consultation on a possible change in the law to give parents more control over the material their children are viewing online.

Internet service providers have been in talks with the Government about ways of enabling parents to block sites containing sexually or gambling as well as forums glorify suicide and self-harm.

a report by MPs who called for a full “opt-in” which would automatically block adult material unless the user chose to deactivate it. Google has argued that an automatic block as a “mistake”, while Virgin Media, BT, TalkTalk and Sky have developed versions of the “active choice” system which makes users chose whether they want parental controls when they sign up, rather than imposing them automatically.

The Copyright Alert System (CAS) was devised by a coalition of internet service providers (ISPs), content owners and the US government to curb illegal downloading by alerting "casual infringers" when illegal filesharing is detected on their IP address

Initially, the alerts are intended to be educational. They tell the customer what happened and how they can prevent it from happening again. If pirating continues to happen through the IP address, users will receive the message again, followed by messages that ask them to confirm they have seen the alerts. The fifth and sixth alert are called mitigation alerts and will temporarily slow users' internet speeds, depending on the ISP.

CAS has also been criticized because the person who audited the MarkMonitor software to ensure that it fairly identifies copyright violations is a former lobbyist for the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), one of the industry groups fronting money for system.