Recent research conducted by research institutes of The Pew Internet & American Life Project, revealed a startling fact: 46 percent of children aged 12 years in the United States already participate in social networks.
Additionally, 73 percent of teens aged 13 to 17 years claimed to have used social networking sites, including Facebook. MUST READ FACEBOOK CAN MAKING CHILD PROSTITUTES
In fact, lately there has been a trend in which cyber criminals (cyber crime) switched to attack from the conventional model, send a virus via email or plant malicious scripts on websites. to the latest methods, namely by committing fraud in the social media sites.
At last report, Symantec, corporate security specialists say, of all the fraud that occurs in all social media is, by almost 95 percent occur in the two leading networking sites ie Facebook and Twitter.
Ironically, users are children or adolescents are the most vulnerable targets.
To that end, earlier this month, Al Franken, a Democrat lawmaker in Minnesota, United States, wrote a letter of protest to Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's Chief Executive Officer. He asked the social networking site overhaul its security settings.
"Currently, about 13 million users are under 18 years may share their personal information such as adult users," Franken wrote, as quoted by the Associated Press, March 24, 2011.
Users of this young age, Franken said, is very vulnerable to criminals who use the Internet or in particular up. "They should not be allowed to share phone numbers and home addresses to anyone," he said.
In fact, numbers called Franken has not depict actual number of Facebook users who are under age.
As is known, the fourth article Statement of Rights and Responsibilities are listed up, are clearly stated in article 1 and 5 that the user may not enter false information, creating an account for someone else without permission, and should not be used up if the users under 13 years.
However, not much can be done by Facebook with the method currently used policy.
"There are many people who lie. Many are still under 13 years but allowed to sign up for Facebook, "said Mozelle Thompson, Chief Privacy Adviser up.
Figures for 13 years, said Thompson, is a minimum age limit which allowed the system to register. "However, the system is not perfect because there is no mechanism to detect whether children are registering with a fake age," he said.
Concerns the number of underage users who sign up and interact in social networks also complained of cyber security committee of parliament of Australia.
Monday, March 21, they had called, not only representing up Mozelle Thompson, the parliament also called representatives of Microsoft and Yahoo for questioning about the Internet-related security issues.
In a statement, Thompson said, they actually made an effort to reduce the number of children under 13 years in their social networking sites.
"We remove up to 20 thousand users per day because they have violated the policy up as disseminating spam, inappropriate content, and including also those who are under age," said Thompson, who was quoted by the Daily Telegraph.
In fact, data from the Global User Demographics up, out of 629,982,480 million Facebook users as of March 2011, noted that 20.6 percent aged 13 to 17 years.
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Besides Facebook, social networking and other sites popular with children also continue working to fix the problem although in a different way.
For example, MySpace, also requires that users aged 13 years and over. Unfortunately, just like Facebook, he had no mechanism for verifying the age of applicants.
Disney.com allow children under the age of 13 years to explore the site and play around in there. But Disney does not collect information about children unless they register, for example, to follow the race, and so forth.
At enrollment, children were asked to fill in his parents' email addresses so that they get a notification. But Disney does not collect any other information beyond that.
Similar steps were taken by Yahoo. They do not allow children under the age of 12 years to do the registration without the knowledge of their parents. After that, just as Disney, Yahoo restrict what information is used to participate in competitions or other similar interactive features. Does up need to implement something similar?
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