According to The New York Times, in September Mr. Cuomo's office began an investigation "into whether the Web site was misleading its users by promoting itself as a place where high school students and younger children are safe from adult sexual predators." This included a subpoena issued to Facebook for documents related to the security supposedly provided by the company. The subpoena was issued after several of Mr. Cuomo's investigators received sexual advances on the profiles they had created for fictional teenagers. Posing as the fictional teenager's mothers, the investigators sent e-mails to the company demanding that it take action against the predators. Additionally, Connecticut's Attorney General Richard Blumenthal has previously criticized the site for allowing three registered sex offenders to create profiles.
To counter this flood of negative publicity and potential legal trouble, Facebook Inc. told The New York Times on Oct. 16 "that it will strengthen warnings about child safety on its site and said that it would take steps to improve its process of responding to complaints about sexual or inappropriate content." Nevertheless, users and parents need to ask whether Facebook is truly a "safe" social networking site, and indeed whether such a thing actually exists.
Facebook does allow allows users to set up security measures, such as forbidding people from other networks from viewing one's profile, and not allowing certain people to view one's pictures. Additionally, under the recent agreement with Cuomo, the site will encourage and act on reports of nudity and lewd comments under independent auspices. However, the problem with user security is that the user must know how to access the page that controls these security measures. Young teenagers would be unlikely to realize that anyone can see all of their information unless they make these alterations, and cannot be expected to have sufficient technological knowhow. Also, those who feel threatened by what they see on the site might not be aware of how to contact the company. Facebook ought to take this into account and thus make its security procedures as user-friendly, comprehensive, and airtight as possible. It would be more responsible of the company to do this rather than put its users at risk from the moment they create a profile. The company should let users know that the security measures are not automatically set to the highest standard, and assume that the newly registered need maximum help in setting up said safeguards. Facebook Inc. can make its product safer, but only through a more realistic handling of its users, especially the most vulnerable among them.
Nonetheless, any steps that Facebook takes will likely be unable to totally rid its service of those who abuse it for their own nefarious purposes. Sexual predators are a sad fact of modern society, and the technology of the Internet has provided them with new avenues through which to attempt the fulfillment of their twisted desires. Unfortunately, social networking sites ipso facto enable such people to make contact with innocent teens under false pretenses.
To the extent that it can improve education and update security measures, Facebook-and MySpace too-can thwart some predators and better their own reputations. A complete victory, though, is an utter impossibility. Because the advantages of social networking come with inherent dangers, this particular advancement has truly been both a gift and a curse.