News: Facebook Signs Protection Pact For Kids
Late last night the AFP reported that Facebook has signed akin to the one that Myspace signed last January. From the press release:
We are raising the safety bar, first for MySpace and now Facebook, and soon for other sites as we fight for an industry gold standard. Facebook and MySpace are showing how to aim higher and keep kids safer.
This is with out a doubt a good thing. The focus of Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumentha and North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper is urging the development of new technologies verifies the age and identities of people using these sites. This would presumably be linked to a database of sex offenders and cyber predators so that they could be flagged or removed. Facebook actually had something similar to this in a way, when only individuals with e-mail address’ attached to an accredited college could join. I’m not saying that the old sytem flagged people in any way, just that it was a way to verify someones identity.In my opinion, there should be a minimum age for Facebook users
They also aim at severing links to pornographic web sites, something that I have not yet seen on official Facebook pages. On app pages on the other hand, I have seen advertisements for porn websites, so I wonder if Facebook will now be more closely monitoring the ads developers choose for their apps. Keep your eyes open for news on this in the future. The full AFP article can be found here.
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