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December 6th, 2007, 19:06 GMT · By Stefan Anitei

Five Dangers Posed by the Internet

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1.Internet can destroy your marriage. Husbands and wives can turn "widows", by remaining abandoned while the spouse spends hours in front of the computer sending messages to strangers in chat forums, downloading music or games, and watching pornography. Another menace for the couples are those sites where old romances are revived through e-mails or where cybersex is practiced. 90,000 British couples face these issues, annually.

2.Daily, there are registered 5.7 million attempts of cheating the Internet users.

3.The Internet speeds up the extinction of endangered species. With the large scale use of the Internet, the illegal on-line trade has boomed. A research made for three months regarding English written sites revealed that over 6,000 objects that were illegally sold or on the way to be sold came from endangered species. Amongst the objects exposed for sell were turtle shells and carvings made of elephant bone. The offer of live animals went from extremely rare parrot species, to black panthers and ape infants.

4.Some interactive sites allow the users to make on-line conversations with strangers, thing that makes manypeople feel accepted. But, these sites
can be a paradise for the racists, Neo-Nazis, and all other kind of extremist groups.

Some users give fake personal information. Others harass the overweight or short persons, or others from another race, provoke a lot of sufferance.

Among 12-20-year-old Dutch who visited the so-called sites of "social networking" and also used a web camera, 40 % of the boys and 57 % of the girls declared that they had been asked to undress or to have a sexual act in the front of the camera.

5.Internet comes with a huge amount of easy accessible information. Things that once needed months of documentation and buying many books and magazines are now available with just one click.

But this can be tricky; it can come with various unwanted information. 42 % of the US youngsters aged 10 to 17 have seen pornography while being on the Internet; more worrying is the fact that 66 % were unwittingly exposed to it, meaning they came across accidentally due to misspelled Web addresses, pop-up advertisements or spam emails.

Many of the exposures to online pornography, wittingly or accidental, were made through the use of file-sharing programs to download images and movies. Some youth may be psychologically and developmentally not prepared for unwanted exposure. Not to mention that on-line images may be more graphic and extreme than pornography available from other sources.

Subjects actively searching for pornography are more likely to be teenage boys, through file-sharing, talked on-line on chat sites about sex with unknown persons, or because being depressed..

Many warn that this can trigger or enhance promiscuity, or compulsive and deviant behavior, as sex is seen as something easy accessible, disconnected from feelings.
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Internet
web
human
behavior

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