By John Boudreau - San Jose Mercury News
Issue date: 5/8/08 Section: MCT News
SAN JOSE, Calif. _ Social-networking giant Facebook, which has faced political pressure to increase online safety, is putting in place 40 safeguards to protect young people from sexual predators and cyberbullies, the company announced Thursday.
The procedures, part of an agreement with attorneys general from 49 states, include age and identification tools and automatic warning messages when a child is in danger of giving personal information to an unknown adult. Facebook, which has 70 million online users, followed the steps of MySpace, which agreed in January to implement similar safeguards.
"The agreement marks another milestone step for social-networking safety _ protecting kids from online predators and pornography," Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal said Thursday.
"Building a safe and trusted online experience has been part of Facebook from its outset," said Chris Kelly, Facebook's chief privacy officer.
Online child safety experts said the changes by the social-networking giants are good first steps.
"It's going to have to be a combination of industry efforts _ putting the tools out there _ and parents setting the rules in the households," said Stephen Balkam, chief executive of the Family Online Safety Institute.
The biggest threat to young people online does not come from strangers, but their peers, he added.
"The statistics show that nearly 90 percent of child sexual abuse cases either occur within the family or with someone the child knows," Balkam said.
The more frequent danger comes from a teen's peer group, such as boys convincing girls to give them naked photos of themselves that then get posted, he said. Risks also arise from divulging information that can hurt them financially, such as being tricked to reveal financial information.
The agreement is good business for Facebook, which must maintain a high level of trust between the site and its community of users, said John Palfrey, executive director of the Berkman Center for the Internet & Society at Harvard Law School.
"Facebook has been on a long trajectory from a comfortable university networking environment to a big business," he said. "These policies are crucially important."
The procedures, part of an agreement with attorneys general from 49 states, include age and identification tools and automatic warning messages when a child is in danger of giving personal information to an unknown adult. Facebook, which has 70 million online users, followed the steps of MySpace, which agreed in January to implement similar safeguards.
"The agreement marks another milestone step for social-networking safety _ protecting kids from online predators and pornography," Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal said Thursday.
"Building a safe and trusted online experience has been part of Facebook from its outset," said Chris Kelly, Facebook's chief privacy officer.
Online child safety experts said the changes by the social-networking giants are good first steps.
"It's going to have to be a combination of industry efforts _ putting the tools out there _ and parents setting the rules in the households," said Stephen Balkam, chief executive of the Family Online Safety Institute.
The biggest threat to young people online does not come from strangers, but their peers, he added.
"The statistics show that nearly 90 percent of child sexual abuse cases either occur within the family or with someone the child knows," Balkam said.
The more frequent danger comes from a teen's peer group, such as boys convincing girls to give them naked photos of themselves that then get posted, he said. Risks also arise from divulging information that can hurt them financially, such as being tricked to reveal financial information.
The agreement is good business for Facebook, which must maintain a high level of trust between the site and its community of users, said John Palfrey, executive director of the Berkman Center for the Internet & Society at Harvard Law School.
"Facebook has been on a long trajectory from a comfortable university networking environment to a big business," he said. "These policies are crucially important."
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