Facebook Doesn’t Need Your Money
According to Om Malik, Facebook needs $300 to $500 million in order to make its site safe for children to use:
The New York attorney general has started investigating the safety measures Facebook has put in place, and based on his preliminary investigations, he is not happy. His staff has found sexual predators and a wide variety of pornographic material, including images and videos, prompting him to issue a subpoena.
Unfortunately, I think the premise is ridiculous. Facebook provides a large number of privacy controls that would allow children to:
- Prevent people finding them in searches
- Prevent strangers from viewing their profile
- Prevent their profile from showing up in Google and other engines
I see Facebook as a piece of infrastructure, like a telephone address book and cellphone, that you find and communicate with people. Generally that lets friends talk to each other, or lonely people find other lonely people nearby; sometimes it lets perverted old men call up kids. The problem isn’t technological; it’s social, and perhaps medical.
Facebook and MySpace are just the tubes; what goes through them isn’t, and shouldn’t be, their concern.
This entry was posted on Saturday, September 29th, 2007 at 3:25 pm and is tagged with sexual predators, new york attorney general, privacy controls, facebook, safety measures, google, york attorney, pornographic material, myspace, old men, subpoena, cellphone, premise, address book, investigations, tubes, infrastructure, images, money. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback.
on September 30th, 2007 at 2:29 pm
Unfortunately, as long as the people who are legislating this are the same who claim “anything that can be a weapon, is a weapon,” I doubt they’ll understand that restricting the tools will not restrict the behavior.
on October 4th, 2007 at 2:08 am
[…] Original post by Elliott Back […]