New York — It is shocking to learn that, according to a study conducted by the Pew, nearly half of all 12 year olds in the U.S. are using social networking sites. But, Facebook’s privacy policy, which describes that users must be at least 13 years old to create an account, and this week the popular social media giant Facebook said that it has banned about 20,000 profiles from the site per day for various infractions, including users who are underage.
Nevertheless it is a headache they are trying to address, and some of those accounts are explicitly dispelled because scores of underage users allegedly fudge the social media network’s rules by listing false ages.
An Australian Senate cyber-safety committee on Monday asked Facebook’s chief privacy adviser, Mozelle Thompson, to address the network’s growing concern of underage users. Representatives from Microsoft and Yahoo were also on the panel.
Thompson’s appearance made headlines when he was quoted in the Daily Telegraph, revealing a startling statistic about the number of underage users who are being removed from Facebook each day.
Underage users are among those routinely cutoff from the social networking site.
“There are people who lie. There are people who are below 13 years of age and are accessing Facebook,” Thompson, quoted as saying in Australia’s Daily Telegraph. “Facebook removes 20,000 people a day, people who are underage.”
Those 20,000 suspect profiles are just the tip of the iceberg. In a statement, Facebook said those scores of removals cover a variety of policy violations, including spam, inappropriate content, and underage use.
Facebook users must be at least 13 years old. In the United States, 3.6 million underage users swarm the social media network Facebook each month, comScore reported, according to the New York Times. While Facebook does have a mechanism in place to detect when a child might be lying about their age, Thompson admitted, “It is not a perfect.”
Furthermore, the scores of figure quoted is but a fraction of the ever growing users that are on Facebook. Moreover, underage users are not merely an issue for the social media network site but for the authorities concerned with privacy issues.
“This is something that we work on all the time,” Thompson said, according to news reports. “There is a lot of things on Facebook that happen on Facebook that do not happen every place else. Like limits on nudity and other things — you cannot do those things on Facebook.”
Though Facebook’s security team has no surefire check against children who list false ages or visit the site’s public pages, Thompson said that the site plans to hire a cyber-safety policy expert in Australia to help deal with Facebook’s underage users in that country.
“At Facebook, we take safety very seriously and we were pleased to participate in a hearing in Australia to talk about our safety policies, practices and systems,” the company said. “As we explained in the hearing, these efforts include removing numerous accounts everyday for activities including spamming, posting inappropriate content, and violating age restrictions.”
Nevertheless, Facebook’s division in Great Britain unleashed a “panic button” in 2010 to safeguard minors from sexual predators online. Still, these measures do not prevent children under 13 from accessing the site, and authorities fear that brief, unsupervised contact with the massive social media network may make children vulnerable to bullies, predators and inappropriate content.