Only two social networking sites fully protect minors

ONLY two social networking sites protect the privacy of minors by default, an EU study has shown.

Efforts to cut down on cyber-bullying, abuse and sexual grooming through improving privacy settings have been successful over the past year. But many social networking sites, including the most popular, Facebook, have not taken all the steps necessary to protect young users.

Only Bebo and MySpace among the 14 sites tested for the European Commission automatically prevented young people’s profiles being accessible to users other than their list of friends.

Tagging people in pictures is also becoming a problem as it makes it very easy to search for a person’s photos online.

The majority of sites allowed friends of friends to connect directly with a user, even if they were strangers. They could contact them through personal messages and in some cases add comments and pictures on their public profiles.

Two sites, Rate and Zap, still allow profiles of minors to be found through external search engines, down from six sites two years ago. But profiles could still be found by non-friend users via the sites’ internal search engines.

Neelie Kroes, the European commissioner responsible for the digital area, said she was disappointed most sites are failing to ensure that minors’ profiles are accessibly only to their approved contacts by default.

“I will be urging them to make a clear commitment to remedy this in a revised version of the self-regulatory framework we are currently discussing.

“This is not only to protect minors from unwanted contacts but also to protect their online reputation”.

According to the EU Kids Online survey carried out earlier this year, the number of young people using social networking sites in the EU is growing. More than 75% of 13 to 16-year-olds and more than two-thirds of nine to 12-year-olds use the internet and many have their own networking profiles.

Ms Kroes has launched a review of the current self-regulatory agreements for the protection of minors online. So far 21 companies have signed the Safer Social Networking Principles.