Mousetrap weblog: Can Facebook protect us from ourselves?

Two and a half million children aged between 8 and 17 have created profiles on social networking sites, according to research. But parents fail to realise that poor security means that about four in ten personal pages are open for anyone to look at.

Although the three main social networks, Bebo, Facebook and MySpace, claim to have a minimum age limit of 13 or 14, a quarter of all children with internet access and aged between 8 and 11 say that they have a page on a social networking site, according to the communications regulator, Ofcom.

The fears for children’s safety are highlighted as worries grow about the influence that social networks have had in encouraging suicides in Bridgend, South Wales. Concerns have also been expressed about the danger of paedophiles.

Robin Blake, the head of media literacy at Ofcom, said: “Parents who allow their children to go online without supervision need to recognise that their children could be at some risk.”

To counter the problem, the Home Office will announce on Friday a new voluntary code of conduct for social networks. Bebo, MySpace and Facebook are to agree that, when under18s set up profiles, they will be set to a high privacy setting as a default.

Last week Tanya Byron, the psychologist on the BBC TV show Little Angels, said that children and parents needed better education on internet safety. Personal profiles on social networks are typically created without security features, but privacy settings can allow the pages to be accessed only by friends.

— A woman who claimed to have been gang-raped after a video of her having sex with teenage boys was posted on YouTube has been arrested on suspicion of perverting the course of justice. No action is to be taken against two boys of 16 and and one of 14, who had been held after the woman said that she had been attacked at her home in Croydon, South London, in February.

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