Facebook Wants To Turn 13 year-olds Into A Marketing Tool
Facebook, as the biggest social network in the world, filled with all kinds of people, has the responsibility to take care of its users privacy. Hence, if you’re under 13, you couldn’t actually register to The Big Blue.
Of course, there are ways to get around this, however, you know it’s wrong and you shouldn’t be on Facebook without adult supervision. Luckily (?) Facebook is working on a technology which should allow younger children to use Facebook under special parental supervision – the parents would have a special access to your account and could keep an eye on you that way.
But, Mooooom!
Admit it, if you’re a parent, how often do you (do you at all?) check what your kids are doing online? You might have a Facebook profile and your kid probably added you on its restricted list so you couldn’t see everything he or she does, right?
Well, Facebook is developing mechanisms which include connecting your children’s accounts to your own, giving you the ability to decide in your kid’s name about who can it friend and what application they can use. It actually extends your parenting from real life into the virtual one.
Giving the Ads to Your Kids
It’s pretty same to assume that Facebook wants to allow access to younger users because that would make a new pool of users for revenue generation from ads. However, with younger users, privacy is probably the biggest concern, even greater then with adults.
Because of the federal laws, Facebook should obtain verifiable parent consent before they start collecting personal data from children; which Facebook should really take care about, taking into consideration how regulators already keep a close eye on it.
So, if everything works well, Facebook will have a nice methodology for easily getting and confirming their (younger) users age which can be used all over the Web in the future with whichever site needs age confirmation. However, privacy issues with Facebook are going to get a lot more serious from now on – and that’s what you, as a parent, should really be worried about.
What do you think – will Facebook be able to create a safe place for the kids?
