Facebook Sets Safeguards Against Sexual Predators

Said reporter posing as girl harassed by men

(NEWSER) - Posing as a 14-year-old girl on Facebook, a Daily Mail reporter was bombarded by messages from 20- to 40-year-old men wanting "to perform a sex act"—only it was really another social networking site, and Facebook is livid and threatening to sue over the misreported story . The author of the item, which appeared yesterday, said he was on another site and that editors added the mention against his wishes. Fine, says Facebook, but the paper was slow to respond and the damage is done. More»

Company analyzing data for MySpace says of 90K booted, minimum 8K back online

(NEWSER) - MySpace grabbed headlines today when it announced that it had kicked 90,000 registered sex offenders off the site over the past 2 years. Where did they all go? Many went to Facebook, says Sentinel, the security firm that roots out such offenders for MySpace. “We found over 8,000 offenders on their site without much effort,” the CEO told TechCrunch. More»

(NEWSER) - A 25-year-old Chicago stockbroker was sentenced yesterday to 35 years in prison for soliciting sex from minors on Facebook, the Tribune reports. Facebook said this appears to be the first case of a sexual predator using the social networking site. Michael Macalindong posed as a girl to lure a teenage boy, and then blackmailed the teen with video of their encounters. More»

Site is all about sharing, so stop expecting a 'silver bullet' fix: Farhad Manjoo

(NEWSER) - Facebook is submitting to a government crackdown on privacy, and Mark Zuckerberg acknowledges “a bunch of mistakes” on that front. But the site’s privacy issues are as much our own fault as Zuck’s, writes Farhad Manjoo in Slate . The “idea that we can control the audience for anything we post online” is simply “misguided,” he writes. “The entire point of Facebook is to allow us to connect and share stuff.” More»

It agrees to independent audits for 20 years

(AP) - Facebook is settling with the FTC over charges it deceived consumers with its privacy settings to get people to share more personal information than they originally agreed to. The charges go back to at least 2009, when Facebook changed its privacy settings so that information users may have deemed private, such as their list of friends, suddenly became viewable to everyone. "They didn't warn users that this change was coming, or get their approval in advance," the FTC said. More»