Facebook improves security for children

Richard Blumenthal, the Attorney General of the US state of Connecticut, and 48 of his counterparts, together with the Attorney General of the District of Columbia, signed an agreement with the Facebook online social network to better protect minors. According to the agreement, Facebook obligates itself to create an automatic system that warns children against providing personal information to strangers. Adults will not be able to search for profiles of minors using the search engine.

The agreement also stipulates that in future it will be more difficult for users to change the age entered in their profile. A record will be kept of every change. Facebook will also deal more severely with pictures and other content that is not suitable for minors. The social network will also be required to maintain a list of pornographic online services and to delete links that point to those services.

Attorneys general of every US state except Texas signed a similar agreement in January of this year with the MySpace social network. This service is taking part, as will Facebook in future, in a technical working group that will develop an age and identification verification system. The agreement also applies to companies that supply Facebook with software.

(trk)