Protecting Children on Facebook

By Matthew Spinks (J#8)
(http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/12/07/facebook.security/index.html)

Facebook has joined forces with five Internet groups to help protect kids, the social-networking site said.
"We believe that the only way to keep kids safe online is for everyone who wants to protect them to work together," Elliot Schrage, a Facebook vice president, said in a statement Sunday.
Facebook's announcement comes less than a week after it added new privacy features, including the ability for users to select who can see each post made to the Web site.
The highlight is deciding which Facebook friends see updates, photos or other posts at the time they're posted -- "something many of you have asked for," Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said.
"In addition, we'll also be fulfilling a request made by many of you to make the privacy-settings page simpler by combining some settings," he said.
A letter on the Web site said that, in the next couple of weeks, Facebook's roughly 350 million users will be asked to review and update their privacy settings. A message on the site will explain the changes and take users to the page where they can update the settings, Zuckerberg said.
There is only so much that Facebook could do, without compromising the privacy of it's more responsible users and although it is implementing a social philosophy that will hopefully control the dangers against children, It is the parents' job to monitor and educate their children on how to behave.
Along with this, facebook even goes so far as to put a cookie on your computer to prevent you from logging into the site if you put in a young age as your birth date which also violates personal privacy, allowing a server to record every persons actions while on the site-in order to provide security for all through observation and computer surveillance.