Facebook Bans 20,000 Kids a Day

autospa writes "Although Facebook requires all users to be 13 or older, the social network bans 20,000 underage users a day, a spokeswoman said. 'There are people who lie. There are people who are under 13 [accessing Facebook],' Mozelle Thompson, Facebook's chief privacy adviser, told the The Telegraph."

Comments

In other news?

[vawwyakr]

20k undercover police officer's fake accounts banded perday from facebook.

I don't understand

[Dan East]

When asked by the Australian parliamentary online safety committee how Facebook can detect those lying on age forms, Thompson replied, "It's not perfect." In fact, it's relatively easy. A standard online form asks a user if he or she is 13 or over, and the user can tell the truth or not. ComScore estimates about 3.6 million of kids under 12 use Facebook in the United States.

Uh, I don't understand this retarded article. How are they determining that users are under 13? The article says "In fact, it's relatively easy." but then goes on to talk about something entirely different. Of course the user can tell the truth or lie, but how is Facebook determining they lie? In their own words "It's not perfect" so what are they doing? Facial recognition to flag people that look young? Network of young friends? Use of improper grammar and slang in posts? I hate lame articles like this.

Re:I don't understand

[Anonymous Coward]

I worked moderating dating/chat websites for a while, and we had to deal with quite a few underage users. There are a few methods for bringing the data to the moderators attention (Bayesian filtering, user reporting, even identifying likely cases by their friends within the site), but they come down to one factor:

People generally only bother to lie about their age in the age field. In their 'about me', in their username, in their pictures, in every single chat conversation or status update they'll be entirely honest under the assumption that the site only checks the Date Of Birth field. After a user/profile has been flagged as likely for whatever reason, it's generally a matter of seconds to verify whether or not that's the case.

Re:Lying about age?

[Anonymous Coward]

You start at -1 because you're a fucking moron and a troll, and because you've recently taken to using dozens of sockpuppets in an attempt to make sure every single person here knows how fucking stupid you are. Something you apparently don't even try to hide anymore considering you posted this as cpu6502 and knew the intentions of a post by commodore64_love.

Re:Age of Consent?

[autocracy]

Federal law prohibits websites from collecting personal information from anyone under the age of 13.