Facebook Users Lax on Privacy, Protecting Children Online

10.05.2011

Facebook screens users and will reject those under 13, but getting in is as simple as falsifying your birth date. Worse yet, researchers believed that a large number of these profiles were unsupervised by their parents. Is this a problem? You bet: About one million children were harassed or cyberbullied on the site last year alone.

There's a simple way these parents could be monitoring their children--simply adding them as a "friend." But surprisingly enough, only 18 percent of parents were doing so for those under 10. For those between 13 and 18, it was much higher at 62 percent.

While we may like to think our children are innocent and angelic when they're little, leaving them unsupervised on the Internet is never a good idea. If you're a parent, take the time to . A little effort could certainly go a long way.

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