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Consumer Reports: 7.5 million Facebook users are under minimum age

Andrew Couts
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facebook-banner-logoA newly published survey by Consumer Reports reveals that millions of Facebook users are actually below the social network’s minimum age limit, reports CNet. According to Facebook’s terms of service, no one under the age of 13 is permitted to have an account. By Consumer Reports’ count, about 7.5 million have slipped beneath the bar.

The survey corroborates evidence found in a 2010 study my security firm McAfee, which showed that about 37 percent of 10 to 12 year old are on Facebook. In total, about 20 million Facebook users are under the age of 18.

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“Using Facebook presents children and their friends and family with safety, security and privacy risks,” said Consumer Reports in a press statement. “In the past year, the use of Facebook has exposed more than five million online U.S. households to some type of abuse including virus infections, identity theft, and–for a million children–bullying.”

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In an attempt to preemptively extinguish the inevitable fires of outrage from parents, Facebook said before the study’s release that “recent reports have highlighted just how difficult it is to implement age restrictions on the Internet and that there is no single solution to ensuring younger children don’t circumvent a system or lie about their age.” The company added that “we appreciate the attention that these reports and other experts are giving this matter and believe this will provide an opportunity for parents, teachers, safety advocates, and Internet services to focus on this area, with the ultimate goal of keeping young people of all ages safe online.”

While critics may accuse Facebook of skirting its responsibility to keep young children off its site, the social network’s recommendations that parents teach their kids which websites are appropriate, and monitor their online activity to ensure they aren’t doing something they shouldn’t echos the findings of the Internet Safety Technical Task Force (ISTTF), which worked with MySpace in 2009 to find out if age verification on websites actually works. (Hint: It doesn’t.)

According to Larry Magin, who served as a member of the ISTTF, Facebook’s requirement that no one under the age of 13 be allowed to use the site stems from regulations outlined in the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), which was enacted in 1998. According to COPPA, websites must receive parental permission before it can allow anyone under age 13 to log in.

Since it is so technically difficult for websites to keep pre-teens from lying about their young ages, Consumer Reports recommends that parents monitor their children’s Web use with the help of spying tools like SafetyWeb or SocialShield, which keeps track of Internet activity.

For further advice about children and Facebook, check out the free e-book, “A Parent’s Guide to Facebook” here.

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Topics
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It's official: Google+ has surpassed 25 million users in just over a month, making it the fastest-growing social network in history, according to visitor counts from comScore.
By comparison, Facebook didn't reach the 25 million mark until three years after it launched. Twitter took two-and-a-half years, or about 30 months, to get to that level, comScore reports.
Of course, massive growth means nothing over the long-term. According to Reuters, MySpace grew faster than either Facebook or Twitter, having reached 25 million unique visitors in less than two years. Today, however, MySpace is stuck at the bottom rung of the social network ladder. Twitter has more than 200 million users. And Facebook is past 750 million users, on its way to the unprecedented 1 billion user mark.
So, that's one thing to keep in mind. The other caveat is that Google+ has a few massive advantages that makes its rise to 25 million users respectable, but not necessarily impressive.
First of all, Google+ has the full backing of Google and all its widespread resources to help push things along. This is almost the equivalent of having the entire Internet at your back. Neither Facebook nor Twitter (or MySpace, for that matter) had this edge. With the notification bar that sits atop every Google-owned webpage, we are constantly reminded to check G+. Your reporter can attest to the effectiveness of this tactic.
Second, as Business Insider's Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry notes, all websites are growing faster nowadays because there are far more people online today than there was five years ago.
Regardless, the growth of Google+ shows that we likely have another major player in the social media game for a long time to come. The site is still officially in invite-only test mode (though getting an invite isn't nearly as difficult as it was a few weeks ago), so it's likely that its growth will only continue to skyrocket.

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More than half of parents use Facebook to snoop on their children
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In a recent survey of 2,000 parents by LAPTOP Magazine, fifty-five percent of parents admitted to using Facebook for digital snooping into the lives of their children. Another five percent would use Facebook if someone taught them how to utilize it. The most common tactic for the digital snooping is checking out the most recent status updates. Other methods of spying on their children included reading  posts on the wall as well as checking out pictures that have been tagged with the child's name. Technically-savvy parents have even logged into a friend's account to gain more access into their child's digital life.
Another 11 percent of the parents polled have only created an account for the sole reason of tracking their children. Of the parents that attempted to send a friend request to their child, approximately four percent of those parents were denied. When asked why they used Facebook to spy on their children, 24 percent of parents claimed that it was the only way to find out what the child was doing. Fourteen percent described themselves as being "nosey" while a larger 36 percent of parents preferred the term "overprotective".
While the behavior is obviously invasive, a recent study by Consumer Reports in June found that there are over seven million children under the age of 13 on Facebook. Of that group, five million of those children are under the age of ten and rarely received any parental supervision while on the site. While Facebook's official policy only allows people ages 13 and up to use the social networking service, the age gate to becoming a member can easily be falsified to open an account. Only 18 percent of the parents with children 10 and under on Facebook made the child their Facebook friend to monitor the page. Even fewer parents (10 percent) sat down with their kids to have a serious discussion on the safety of social networks and the Internet.

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According to the study, the average American has 634 social ties in their overall network of friends and contacts (not just on social networks). This breaks down to about 506 ties for non-internet users and 669 ties for those who use the internet. As one might expect, the more someone uses the internet, the more social ties that person tends to have. The average person who uses the internet at home several times per day has a network of 732 ties, while someone who only goes online about once per day has an average of 616 ties. Likewise, those who have a mobile phone have an average of 664 ties, and those who have a smartphone tend to have about 717 ties.
This is all fine and dandy, but one might argue that "ties" don't necessarily equate to how many actual close friends people have. Pew addresses this, noting that Americans actually have more "close friends" than they did two years ago, due mostly to the influx of smartphones and social networking sites like Facebook. The average American has 2.16 close confidants, up from 1.93 in 2008. Concordantly, only 9 percent of Americans reported that they had no close confidants in their life, down from 12 percent two years ago.
As it turns out, the average internet user is even less likely to have no confidants (7 percent) and and has more close ties (2.27 per person) than a non-user, who has an average of 1.75 close friends and a 15-percent chance of having no close friends at all. Those who regularly use social network sites (SNS) bump this number up; only 5 percent of SNS users have no close friends and overall, they average about 2.45 close friends.
To crank it up one more notch, Pew points to Facebook, in particular, as a driving force in gaining and retaining close friendships. Regular Facebook users have 9 percent more close friendships than any other group.
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As a side note, the study also shows just how unpopular MySpace is these days (as if we needed to tell you). The graph above shows how long users of each site have been around. While sites like Twitter have a very low retainment rate with only 11 percent of users sticking around for at least two years, MySpace has the opposite problem: only 3 percent of its users are new to the service. Like Japan, it has an aging population. Worse, few of its users visit the site regularly, as seen in the chart below.

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