Facebook adopts new Web safety standards
49 states sign off on site's added rules
NEW YORK - Facebook Inc., the second-biggest social networking website, agreed with 49 states and the District of Columbia to adopt new safety standards to better protect children.
The agreement is similar to one the states reached in January with competitor MySpace Inc., a unit of News Corp., Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal said yesterday. Texas didn't take part in either settlement.
Facebook agreed to restrict users over age 18 from seeking out younger users, send warning messages when a child is in danger of providing personal data to an unknown adult, and act more aggressively to remove inappropriate content and groups from the site. The company will also take part in a task force headed by MySpace to develop age and identity verification software.
MySpace and Facebook have come under attack by regulators for not doing enough to police their sites and shield minors. Since 2006, Blumenthal and North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper have led a working group of state attorneys general seeking to tighten online protections.
A Facebook spokesman said the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company is committed to "improving our technology and policy solutions to keep kids safer."
Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott sent a public letter yesterday to Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg saying the deal fails to adequately protect children. "We cannot endorse any initiative that fails to implement a reliable age-verification system. Doing so would give Texas parents and their children a false sense of security," Abbott wrote. He has sent a similar letter to MySpace chief executive Chris DeWolfe.
The Facebook agreement restricts users from changing their listed ages.
Beverly Hills, Calif.-based MySpace said it would strengthen the technology that enforces the site's minimum age of 14 and make pages of users who are 16 and 17 accessible only by people with whom they agreed to be online friends.
The agreement also requires companies offering Facebook users services, called "widgets," to implement the new guidelines, Blumenthal said.
