Last month 17 of the main European social web providers, including Bebo, Myspace, Yahoo Europe and Facebook signed an agreement to do more to protect children using social networks. It's good to see providers recognising their responsibility in this area. They will work to reduce risks of cyberbullying, risky behaviour (such as revealing personal data in profiles), and grooming by sexual predators.
Each provider will report to the European Commission in April on their own safety measures. The principles of the agreement are that providers should
* Have a "report abuse" button
* Ensure under 18's profiles are set to "private" by default
* Ensure their private profiles are not searchable
* Make privacy options prominent
* Preventing access by under-age users
These are all measures which can impact on safer use of the social web by teenagers. It will also make it more difficult for people to search for details of teenagers - for example careers advisers might legitimately wish to find out about a youngster's progression - perhaps from a school to a college or training programme. This will become harder if these measures are introduced, and will mean that career service providers will need to review policies, especially in relation to advisers presence on social networks, and how they interract with their teenage clients.
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