Facebook Case Study

Here is a interesting case study dated on 20 Febuary 2009.

Facebook has removed 5,500 sex offenders from its social networking website since May last year. It follows news from Myspace that it had removed 90,000 sex offenders from its website in the last two years. The two websites were asked by a US attorney general to implement a range of safeguards, including better ways to verify users' ages and limiting older users' ability to search the profiles of those under 18, the Associated Press reported. Facebook said it had found the offenders through a mixture of user reports, working with law enforcement agencies and using the national sex offenders' register. Facebook's chief privacy officer said the company has proposed a system in the US that will check available outlets in real time to block sex offenders at the beginning of the registration process. At the moment, the policy is to remove offenders when they are identified.

Information taken from: http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2009/02/20/234945/Facebook-removes-5500-sex-offenders.htm

Can you imagine, out of 600 million active users, only 5500 sex offender's profile has been removed? Till this day, we still do not know how many sex offenders are there under a fake profile and how many since the case study's date have been caught. There are many sex offenders still out there and Facebook is still trying hard to get rid of them .This is the reason why we have to be careful when people whom we do not know adds us as friends on Facebook. The information that they post on their profile may not be genuine, thus we must always be on our guard against people like this.

Thank you!