Days after Facebook announced their support for the Bullyproof campaign, the head of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre in the U.K., Jim Gamble, is challenging Facebook on their existing child protection policies. While Facebook already has effective reporting mechanisms that have worked in the past, Gamble would (not surprisingly) like for Facebook to implement the Ceop button for protecting children.
Facebook is extremely confident in their existing system however, telling the BBC that:
We are confident that the Ceop button is an excellent solution for sites that have not invested in as robust a reporting infrastructure as Facebook has in place and one we continue to improve.
Investing time in a debate with Ceop may ultimately accomplish nothing yet that isn’t stopping Jim Gamble from offering Facebook with the opportunity to debate the issue a public forum. Apparently the company’s statement to the BBC wasn’t sufficient, and instead the BBC suggests that Facebook “come on the radio and defend itself against its critics”. In contrast to Jim Gamble, who’s job is to build awareness for the Ceop, Facebook doesn’t have much of a problem building awareness about their service.
With countless critics around the world, it doesn’t make much sense for Facebook to invest resources in public debates aside from having their communications department commenting on issues. When the issue becomes a legal one, Facebook has historically shown a willingness to cooperate. Just yesterday, Facebook adopted their latest privacy policy which was a result of a complaint filed by the Candian Privacy Commission.
For now the issue is nothing more than an extremely vocal leader of a child protection organization in the U.K. making what appears to be questionable claims that Facebook isn’t doing enough to protect their users.
The complaints are not questionable at all.
Comment by W — November 18, 2009 @ 7:43 am
Is the reason Mr. Gamble wants facebook to adopt the ‘Ceop’ Button a way for CEOP to find paeodophiles online. Would it have some sort of tracking system on facebook which would link into CEOP’s systems?
I have to agree with the last paragraph of this article unless there is something that I have missed.
Comment by Jennifer — November 18, 2009 @ 1:25 pm
The US is blessed with a remarkable tool that will assist with this. A fairly new company, WebSafety, provides a Web and Cell product to protect against bullying, sexting, and more! AT&T, Sprint, NONE of the cell phone companies can provide the protection this company has implemented, to include online chat rooms!
For the scoop on how this works on a Cell Phone, here's a link to a feature on Good Morning America: http://mywebsafety.com/Site/Video.asp?Pin=54085&a...
We can't do ENOUGH these days as predators seem to keep one step ahead of us. . . BUT it is NEVER too late to take action!
Comment by TV — November 19, 2009 @ 9:12 am
Whilst I agree on some aspects of what facebook are trying to acheive. There are many aspects of facebook that are heavily questionable. The situation about paedophiles on facebook, there are many possibly "fake" profiles which link to Ian Huntley and Maxine Carr, and others no doubt, you will probably find Paul Gadd on there if you search hard enough, Facebook have a policy to remove ANY known child offenders, but these profiles, whether they are fake or not, still exist! This is actually AGAINST facebook's terms and conditions, but Facebook cannot keep their own terms, let alone anyone else. The report system on their network often result in nothing, I have been a victim of a vicious bullying campaign, I have reported the said people, but nothing happened, they are still on facebook, and still are free to bully others, and I am 40!! So bullying is not just about teenagers, adults are bullied too!! There are also many profiles on there, particularly foreign ones, that will add children, and offer sex to them, even though you try to tell them that you are 13-14-15, they still want sex!! Facebook was notified, but the accounts still exist!! Good reporting system hey!!!
There should be more safety to younger people on there, there should also be more in the way of spammers, with so many profiles created by the sex industry on there, offering all sorts of cyber sex weirdness. There should be something done to stop random accounts being created with maybe more emphasis on some applications having to go thru the same situation as setting up the main account, with CAPTCHA text etc. When you report an application for abuse as far as pornographic pictures, etc, then something gets done with the application and also the owner of the account! Facebook takes no responsibility of the various applications it has to offer, which yes I can see why, but if the application breaks facebooks own conditions then the applications should be taken down and sorted properly and the owner of the application should clear out the problem users and sort it out so that it cannot happen again!
Parents should take a lot more responsibility for their kids being on sites likes these, even Myspace and Bebo have a minimum age of 13!! So none of these social network sites are really for very young kids. I have seen even with my own niece who was 12, she got on facebook with an age of 25!! The parents should not entirely blame facebook for things that go on, the parents should be supervising what their kids get up to, and with things like Parental Controls in Windows Vista and Windows 7, and other proprietry software that exists on the internet for around £40 a time, there is no excuse for parents to not know what their kids are up to even over a network, if a child of under 18 has a laptop of their own, either the kid is heavily spoilt, or their parents are a little irresponsible in allowing the child unfiltered access to the whole of the internet!! I had to buy my own computers, and when I was a teenager the internet was pretty much in its infancy with just compuserve available and that cost a fortune to have, so basically it was a total no go, and the transmission speeds were only around 300 baud, so there was no real content apart from teletext style graphics!! ALSO nearly ALL modern routers have the facility of blocking certain use of certain computers outside certain times, and pretty much all have a URL block, but parental control is so much better, because it is linked to the PC alone and not the network, and the kid cannot get in to change the details unless you allow the kid to have administrator rights on their laptops or desktop PC's. But even that can be sorted! With a programme called Advanced Parental Control, even if the child has administrator rights you can block all sorts of stuff, saving pics, downloading images, mp3's, changing the time of the computer, you can key log conversations, get screen grabs, you can even block the clipboard for when kids to a PRINT SCREEN and attempt to paste it into PAINT, there are also ways of blocking programs that they can use, well worth a look!
Comment by J Carey — December 2, 2009 @ 1:45 pm