http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thelookout/20110323/bs_yblog_thelookout/facebook-kicks-off-20000-underage-users-a-day
Mozelle Thompson is the chief privacy adviser of Australia's parliament. According to Thompson, about 20,000 underage users sign up for Facebook everyday. There is a 13 years old and up age requirement, but the site has no way of finding out if the user is really 13 or older. A study from Pew found that about half of 12 year olds in the United States use social networking websites. Senator Al Franken, a Minnesota Democrat, says "These younger users are the most vulnerable to predators to Facebook and the rest of the Internet and it should be impossible for them to inadvertently share their phone numbers and home addresses with anyone." Some websites, like Yahoo! and Disney.com, require children 12 and under to sign up for their sites with a parent present.
Social networking websites have no way of knowing how old their users are unless the user provides that information. Also, they don't know whether or not parents know their children are on the Internet. Virtually, there is no way for these websites to monitor children on the Internet. The only solution I personally can think of is that parents should be in the same room as their children when they're on the Internet. By this, I think that children will be safer and won't do anything inappropriate.
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