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24 Jul 08
Anne BubnicConnecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal has made it one of his priorities to install methods of protection for the state's children when it comes to using these Web sites, hoping to "make social networking safer," according to a press release generated by his office. Efforts by Facebook and MySpace to protect privacy are described in this article.
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For the past two years Blumenthal and other states' attorneys general have negotiated with both Facebook and MySpace to implement more than 60 new safety measures to protect children from online predators and from gaining access to inappropriate content, like pornography.
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Under the agreement with Facebook, its officials have agreed to prominently display safety tips, and to require users under the age of 18 to affirm that they have read the tips. Users over 18 can no longer search for under-18 users, and Facebook officials will automatically be notified when someone under 18 is in danger of providing personal information to an adult user.
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Parents will also be provided with tools to remove a child's profile from the site. Inappropriate images and content will be removed, and ads for age-restricted products, like alcohol and tobacco, will be limited to users old enough to purchase those items.
Most significantly, Facebook agreed to diligently search for and remove profiles of registered sex offenders, and it will "increase efforts to remove groups for incest, pedophilia, cyber-bullying and other violations of the site's terms of service and expel from the site individual violators of those terms."
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Under the agreement, MySpace now allows parents to submit their child's e-mail address to prevent anyone from using that e-mail address to set up a profile (e-mail addresses are required in order to set up an account for either Facebook or MySpace, and people may search for "friends" by entering e-mail addresses).
For anyone under 16, MySpace will automatically set the profile to "private," allowing only approved people to view the profile. There is now a closed "high school" section of the site set aside for users under 18.
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Like Facebook, MySpace officials will also "obtain and constantly update a list of pornographic Web sites and regularly sever any links" between the sites. MySpace agreed to provide a way to report abuse on every page that contains content. The site's officials also promised to respond to complaints of inappropriate content within 72 hours.
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