A safer place for kids
Social networking sites operating in Europe signed a pact on Tuesday, dedicated to tackling the problem of "cyberbullying" and protect the privacy of underage users, reports The Globe and Mail.
Hoping to make the internet safer for children, the European Commission (EC) announced that some 17 social networking sites — including Facebook and MySpace — have agreed to take measures to cut the risks of children harassing peers online, and to prevent adults from befriending children online with the intention of committing sexual abuse — a practice known as grooming.
Social networking grew 35% in Europe over the past year, with an expected 107.4 million users by 2012. (Some 12.1 million people are now accessing socnets via mobile as the trend picks up speed in Western Europe.)
The EC said the aim of the voluntary agreement is to prevent private profiles of users under age 18 from being accessible on websites or search engines, and to provide a visible and easy-to-use one-click "report abuse" button.
Other social networking sites that signed the EU agreement are: Arto, Bebo (owned by AOL), Dailymotion, Giovani.it, Google/YouTube, Hyves, Netlog, Nasza-klaza.pl, One.lt, Skyrock, StudiVZ, Sulake/Habbo Hotel, Yahoo! Europe, and Zap.lu.
Europe has been marred by a handful of sex scandals involving minors in the past several years. To address this, in 2003 government bodies formed a special commission dealing with the online safety of minors.
Britain introduced procedures to improve online safety last April, and similar agreements exist between the United States, MySpace and Facebook.
MySpace recently revealed that over the past years it barred some 90,000 registered sex offenders from using the site. In January, it collaborated with the attorneys general of 49 states and rallied a task force to deal with the problem.
In 2007, the attorneys general of New York and New Jersey filed subpoenas against Facebook for negligence in protecting underage users. It began working with attorneys general nearly all states to address these problems.
The United States is not without its own cyber bullying scandals. In June 2008 a Connecticut student was punished by her high school for calling a school administrator a "douchebag" on her personal blog. And in November 2008, a Missouri mother was convicted for three misdemeanor counts of computer fraud. The woman posed as a young boy in order to win the trust of a local 13-year-old girl, who later committed suicide when the "boy" heckled her.
