But it's nevertheless a headache they're trying to address. The Daily Telegraph is reporting that roughly 20,000 children are booted off Facebook every day for lying about their age.
But it could be considered an almost impossible problem to solve because Facebook has no mechanisms to work out whether a new user is telling the truth when he or she signs up. "It's not perfect," said Facebook's chief privacy adviser Mozelle Thompson.
And the 20,000 figure quoted is but a fraction of the 600 million (and ever growing) users that are on Facebook. What's more, underage users aren't merely an issue for the social network site but for regulators concerned with privacy issues. In the U.S., that's been spearheaded of late by Senator Al Franken, who has already been the co-author of a letter to CEO Mark Zuckerberg related to collecting the personal data of users.
"These younger users," said Franken (referring at the time to teenagers between the age of 13–17) are the most vulnerable to predators on Facebook and the rest of the Internet and it should be impossible for them to inadvertently share their phone numbers and home addresses with anyone." And Franken would no doubt note the grim irony that, when it comes to the preteen market, this is no laughing matter.
Source; yahoo.com http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20110323/us_time/httpnewsfeedtimecom20110323facebookkicksoff20000underageuserseverydayxidrssfullnationyahoo
3 comments:
I don't feel any younger than 16 should be on Facebook. Parents have enough to worry about without having to constantly check on their children's FB. Personally I feel children shouldn't be spending time on something that is really useless and teaches nothing about social skills. No wonder children can't carry on a decent conversation anymore.
I also don't think the government should interfer. It's a parents responsiblity to shield their kids away from anything including FB which could open a door to trouble.
RE: 10:05:00 AM
Ditto, I am not a very strict parent but I would not let my boys have a facebook, myspace, twitter, etc. account until they became 18 years old. They both understood and respected that ... in fact even after they turned 18 they both still asked for permission to open a F/B account, I'm very lucky to have two very good boys.
I especially agree that the government needs to stay the 7734 out of our personal lives, it does NOT take a village, it take good parental skills and mean what you say and stick to it
I have personally seen kids I know who are 10 and 12 years on on facebook posing doing those "gang" gestures and I can't believe the parents are so ignorant to allow this!
I agree with Mrs Obama on this one. Kids have no business having facebook. I wouldn't let my child have one because I wouldn't want a complete stranger on the street to know their name. I myself have been able to finally put a name to a face that I've seen around for years because of facebook. In thinking it over it's a great tool for child molesters and other perverts.
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