CREEPY SOCIAL MEDIA

I only use facebook because my close relatives use it. It's the only way I can keep up with many of them.

Do u believe that she will henceforth make efforts to prevent u from finding out
what she is doing, so that sort of thing will not happen to her again ??

My wife and I strictly watch what she does online. (I had previously thought that Facebook had a kids only section. I guess I was wrong.)

They probably should. It would be no skin off my nose to lose game "neighbors."

Understood that u do,
but will she see a need to defend her privacy
in order to avoid having her efforts frustrated again ?

I don't know that grouping them all in a supposedly 'isolated' area would be any safer. Possibly even more dangerous unless they were able to drastically improve upon their age verification capabilities.

many others use photos of their young children...

That's another reason not to rely on the photos, but on their reported age. If some kid is 11, and says he is 13 so he can register, they still don't need to recommend a kid like that to me to be "friended."

There is a stupid US law (COPPA) that requires such sites to not accept registrations from users under the age of 13 without written consent from the parents. Despite this there are over 7 million such accounts of kids on Facebook and they just lie about their ages.

Personally I find this all absolutely stupid, it should be a matter between parents and children but even if the parents want to allow their kids to use a site (e.g. this dad, whose son was kicked out of gmail after signing up for Google+) most sites often do not do so because of the overhead of setting up a way to get written consent from the parents (and the liability they might face if they fall for a false doc).

I personally can't wait till the older, paranoid generations give way to a more open internet. If I had a kid they'd be allowed to use Facebook, email etc as soon as they were physically capable of doing so and I bet my generation will be closer to this than the paranoid grannies that run America.

Well, i suppose i'm one of your grannies. But i'm not calling for laws, but responsibility on the part of the site owners, and i don't consider it unreasonable. I don't care at what age people sign up for FB, but i do care that the site is recommending kids as friends for adults. This is not something parents want happening in the real world.

If you aren't calling for laws then I don't think you are who I'm talking about. If someone wants to prevent their kid from getting on the internet till they are 18, or wants to make a site that doesn't allow kids I have no problem with that. What I object to is the law that requires all social sites to do this in a very stupid way (standard COPPA compliance is: ask them if they are under 13, and then if they say they are ask them to fax a document from their parents).

And I don't personally find recommending 10-year-old friends to a 60-year-old creepy, if anything I find the adults taking over their kids' accounts for FB games to be, but this is all influenced by this stupid COPPA law. If kids weren't forced to lie about their ages to sign up it'd be easier to deal with them more age-appropriately. But in this particular case, I think the entire problem stems from adults co-opting the identity of children to gain virtual goods in games.

When you say you are calling for responsibility on the part of the site owners what do you have in mind? Their policy is to disable profiles for anyone under 13 but how are they supposed to know that? It's easy for you to tell the picture is a kid but that is not easy to do with machines and many parents put their kids in their profile pics as well, further complicating this all.

I think this isn't the site's responsibility at all, and that it's up to the parents to parent their kids. That's why I hate the law, it asks site owners to try to block kids and it's hard to tell who's a kid over the internet.

Dunno......we are tending to call it rape book at work ( though the majority of my colleagues use it obsessively) because of the number of raped kids we are now seeing who met some guy on Facebook, got to "really get to know and like him and I knew he wasn't like the creeps my mum keeps warning me about" and were innocent enough to agree to meet him/them without their parents knowing.

Of course, it's the more vulnerable kids who tend to do this, just as those kids are often the target of sexual predators in the real world. But it and other social media do seem to be extending the range of options for people who like to sexually assault others.

Some of these kids appeared to be pretty well versed in net safety, but the rapists were skilled in seeming trustworthy, and what kid doesn't take risks?


I'd be damn watchful of a kid of mine using social media, and I find it disturbing that Facebook's friending process seems not very discriminating..


Most of what we've been seeing isn't old guys pretending to be younger though....it's sometimes same age boys, or men from about eighteen to thirty, so I'm not sure if Sets original point is especially risky or not.

I know I sure would.

This has more to do with their scale than anything else. They have nearly 800 million active users (not total accounts). That's many times more than there were internet users in the whole world when this site started. A lot of bad stuff happens in the world, and when half of the internet-connected world is on one site that site's gonna come up a lot in those cases.

Would you blame the phone company if the pedos were doing this by phone?



Why do you say it's not discriminating? It's not like they are suggesting random kids to Setanta, he's friending a bunch of kids' accounts to play games so they seem to be folks he knows (if they didn't accept the friendship their friends wouldn't be recommended to him). And just because they suggest the friends doesn't mean he can talk to them, they still have to accept etc.

Again, what do you want the site to do? They already prohibit kids under 13 from joining.

We already went over this. My problem is that these are unsolicited recommendations. They could require us all to use the friend finder, and that would leave an electronic record of who was checking out whom. That would be a lot different from them using a bot to recommend possible friends to me based soley on who is on my friend list now. Since this thread started, i've had eight more recommendations for "friends" who are, to me at least, obviously children. I think the site owners are far more concerned with increasing active membership and traffic, and i'll bet that if they are typical capitalists, they really don't think about and probably don't care who might get hurt in the process.

Parents want to know in real life who their children meet and hang around with--why should it be any different online?

It seems to me, RG, that you're basically saying "It's too hard, they can't stop everyone, so why try?" Any measure which would decrease the access of predatos to their prey is going to be worthwhile.

Yeah, I know bad **** happens everywhere...but I think it's the scale that forms part of the problem.....the people who want to do bad stuff to other people have relatively easy access to a much bigger pool of possible victims without having to leave their homes for most of the grooming process, and with less reality checking possible by the people targeted. That is, I think that the Facebook/dating site effect is more than just the same amount of **** happening as happens with similar numbers in the rest of the world, but that some social media is making it a lot easier for the bad folk.

I don't really expect Facebook to do anything.....I think it's just an artifact of getting large herds of possible targets together in one spot ( kind of like the last waterhole left in the area in a drought becomes an easy hunting ground for lions).

A similar thing could theoretically happen here.

But I do think it's very important for kids and parents to know this sort of stuff, and I guess I'd like to see Facebook making it clear that kids are liable to fet friending suggestions about random people to whom they have no actual social connection, if that's what's happening.

BTW I'm aware the jury is still out on whether social media related sexual assaults are outstripping more traditional ones......we might just be seeing a statistical bump....but it's gone on for a few years now, and I note the police sexual assault folk here are starting a publicity campaign to try to educate kids and adults about possible dangers of sites like Facebook and adult dating sites for the unwary.

There is a group on facebook "operation safe kids"
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Op-SafeKids/114268165331646
and they look for violations and exploitations against children.
It's mind boggling to read some of it and facebook seems to have become a new venue for pedophiles and the likes.

My daughter (almost 16) does have a facebook account, but I monitor it
closely - every day actually, and I have deleted "friends of friends" she
assumed where friends with hers, but it turned out no one knew them really.

It's a great social tool for kids and one can hardly deny it, but the kids need to be guarded and monitored, it's very unfortunate, yet necessary.

A lot of it comes down to parental vigilance, just as in everyday life. However, random bot-generated friend recommendations not only don't help, they hurt, they interfere.