Many abusers suffer from sleep exhaustion. Of the numerous problems cited, a task force on electronic commerce appointed by President Clinton revealed that businesses advertising on the web routinely lure children into volunteering their real names, addresses, and phone numbers in exchange for gifts of T-shirts and CD players. In turn, many companies sell the names to others, leaving data on these cybertots circulating throughout the unregulated web. The Internet's interactive features plunk children down in the middle of steamy streets that contain thousands of strangers who may, at any click of the mouse, entice them into looking at dirty pictures, invite them to private meetings, forward their personal information throughout cyberspace, or even urge them to run away from home. In a survey reported by USA Today, eighty-six percent of the responding teachers, librarians, and computer coordinators believe that Internet usage by children does NOT improve classroom performance.
Many colleges provide their students with unlimited access to the Internet.
By doing so, they are becoming major breeding grounds for Internet addiction. For example, the dropout rate at Alfred University more than doubled. Provost W. Richard Ott saw no logical explanation why so many students who arrived in college with SAT scores of 1,200 or higher were failing so quickly. There are hundreds of Internet sites that provide their visitors with interactive games, each with their own theme. They are highly addictive.