Facebook Kicks Off 20,000 Underage Users Every Day

[The Northerner]

Would it surprise you to learn that, according to a Pew study, nearly half of all 12-year-olds in the U.S. use social network sites, even though they don't meet the minimum age requirements? For Facebook, it's a headache they could do without.

But it's nevertheless a headache they're trying to address. The Daily Telegraph is reporting that roughly 20,000 children are booted off Facebook every day for lying about their age.

But it could be considered an almost impossible problem to solve because Facebook has no mechanisms to work out whether a new user is telling the truth when he or she signs up. "It's not perfect," said Facebook's chief privacy adviser Mozelle Thompson.

And the 20,000 figure quoted is but a fraction of the 600 million (and ever growing) users that are on Facebook. What's more, underage users aren't merely an issue for the social network site but for regulators concerned with privacy issues. In the U.S., that's been spearheaded of late by Senator Al Franken, who has already been the co-author of a letter to CEO Mark Zuckerberg related to collecting the personal data of users.

Read more: http://newsfeed.time.com/2011/03/23/facebook-kicks-off-20000-underage-users-every-day/#ixzz1HRhe2PGm

[villager]

1. My son's 6th grade class will be disappointed to hear this.

n/t

[aquart]

2. What's the minimum age?

[zbdent]

3. how many of them are Repugs posing as 12-year-olds?

You know, "curious about sex" ...