Million of British brats spent time on Facebook everyday

One million British children under 13 are using Facebook every day, providing damning evidence the company is failing to protect youngsters.

Facebook and other social networks are signed up to a voluntary policing regime that is supposed to prevent under-13s from becoming members.

However, the organization billionaire founder Mark Zuckerberg is opposed to such restrictions, while the company is apparently failing to enforce them.

The figure is far higher than earlier estimates and suggests a large proportion of children aged seven to 12 are creating fake profiles in order to exchange messages with school friends and others.

At the same time, some parents are apparently being pestered by young children to allow them to set up a Facebook page.

read more at http://goo.gl/Eo89P

source: The UK Mail

August babies 'more likely to leave school at 16, binge drink and suffer bullying

Children born in August do significantly worse in exams than classmates born 11 months earlier at the beginning of the academic year, a landmark study shows.

August-born boys are 12 per cent less likely than September-born boys to get good GCSEs and girls are 9 per cent less likely.

In addition, August-born youngsters are 20 per cent more likely to ditch academic study and learn a trade from the age of 16. They are 20 per cent less likely to go to an elite university. 

So, are you an august baby?

read more at http://bit.ly/ucGCKg

source: UK Mail Online

Anonymous Shuts down Hidden Child Abuse Hub

Members of hacktivist collective Anonymous are claiming credit for shutting down a deep underground child abuse site and outing its membership list.


Account details of 1,589 members of Lolita City were posted as part of Anonymous’ Operation Darknet, a wider effort aimed against abuse of the Tor network by paedophiles. Lolita City, said to be hosted by Freedom Hosting, alone housed more than 100GB of child pornography, according to a statement by Anonymous.






Original Article: http://bit.ly/uVLhrc

Why Facebook is After Your Kids

In May 2011, Consumer Reports announced that 7.5 million kids age 12 and younger are on Facebook. The magazine called this “troubling news,” in no small part because their presence is at odds with federal law, which bars Web sites from collecting personal data about kids under 13 without permission from their parents. “Clearly, using Facebook presents children and their friends and families with safety, security and privacy risks,” Consumer Reports concluded.

Increasingly, Facebook is staking its future relevance and profits on this idea of sharing, which it made “frictionless” in late September. With certain apps on Facebook, like Spotify, you can choose to enable a feature where everyone can see what you’re listening to or viewing, without your hitting another key. Before rolling out frictionless sharing, Facebook emphasized that it is now easier to see what your default settings are. But the company refuses to change those settings so that the default would establish more privacy, no doubt because it affects Facebook’s bottom line.

As Zuckerberg put it in a radio interview: “We help you share information, and when you do that, you’re more engaged on the site, and then there are ads on the side of the page. The more you’re sharing, the more — the model all just works out.” Default settings are particularly important to this vision because most people (and especially teenagers) never change them. A recent Columbia University study of 65 college students found that 94 percent were sharing personal information on Facebook that they had not intended to make public.

Original Article: http://nyti.ms/pb2YUn