In yesterday's Essentials I mentioned that Facebook has adopted a bunch of safety measures similar to what MySpace did awhile back to appease the Attorneys General. For anyone who didn't follow the link over to TechCrunch, here they are with my commentary in [brackets]:

- Require companies offering services -- called "widgets" or applications -- to implement and enforce Facebook's safety and privacy guidelines; [this may be cost prohibitive for some startups, especially if screening user generated content becomes mandatory]

- Review and scrutinize requests by a user to change his or her age. Requests to change profile ages will be logged, and Facebook will grant only a single request to change an age above or below 18. [ok, I guess this is supposed to prevent predators from lying about their age though research has shown only 5 percent actually do]

- Maintain and continuously update a list of pornographic websites and regularly sever any links to such sites; [fine, they're just a click away on "the internets"]

- Increase efforts to remove groups for incest, pedophilia, cyberbullying and other violations of the site's terms of services and expel from the site individual violators of those terms, [this is positive]

- Aggressively remove inappropriate images and content; [notice doesn't define what's inappropriate or require mandatory screening...yet]

- More prominently display safety tips; [people don't read these, but fine]

- Require users under 18 to affirm they have read Facebook's safety tips when they sign up; [useless]

- Regularly review models for abuse reporting and perform a test using the New Jersey Attorney General's abuse reporting icon. [I don't know why they have to use that icon -- I guess they want consistency across sites -- it's definitely noticeable and I think, any way to make reporting abuse more obvious is positive]

- Restricting searches by over-18 users so they cannot seek under -- 18 users, along with other significant limits on searches; [so you can't really find your students or teens unless you ask them to friend you first]

- Limiting certain ads for age-restricted products -- such as alcohol and tobacco -- to users old enough to purchase such items; [makes sense]

- Identifying and removing profiles of all registered sex offenders;

- Sending automatic warning messages when a child is in danger of providing personal information to an unknown adult; [ok - so does this work when teens have joined a group and left their profile open to the entire group or network?]

- Providing extensive privacy controls allowing the user to block access to their profile, restrict information available to users not their friends and prevent another user from contacting them; [we know many young people don't change their default settings -- more complexity means less active management unless we work on education]

- Providing parents with tools to remove their underage child's profile from the site. [I don't know if underage means under 13 or under 18 -- if it's under 18, teens will most likely just create an alias profile or go elsewhere]

Also eCRUSH's Amy Gibby commented on this yesterday:

The Facebook safety/privacy deal has been a long time coming. The comments on Tech Crunch raised some important issues, especially how do the big guns (facebook, myspace, google, etc) share these best practices to hundreds maybe thousands of other sites that reach teens in some social capacity. As changes start to roll out, none of this should be proprietary as it is all being done to protect the safety of teens. Like the predators database, it should be available to all and not with a price tag. Maybe this greater scope is part of their agenda... i don't know. If there is a priority to support niche sites, can that please be made public? and can there be a way for sites to contribute to the dialog to make sure their users' interests are also protected?

Seems like a great jumping off point for discussion...

Posted by anastasia