Facebook kicks off 20,000 underage users a day

OK people, here's a news flash about Face book!!!! Are kids slipping through the cracks in Face books just-ask age screening approach? The social networking site kicks off around 20,00 underage users per day ,its chief privacy adviser, Mozelle Thompson, told Australia's Parliament this week. He admitted that the site's way of weeding out those who don't meet the 13-and-up age requirement -- essentially a user-entry honor system -- is "not perfect," because there's no mechanism for detecting kids who have simply entered a false age. "There are people who lie. There are people who are under 13," Thompson said. A recent Pew study found that nearly half of all the U.S. 12-year-olds use social networking sites -- and privacy concerns in regard to Face books younger members have been growing of late. This month, Sen. Al Franklin, a Minnesota Democrat, wrote to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerburg to argue for reforms in the site's privacy measures. "Under Facebook's policy, 13 millon users under the age of 18 may be allowed to share their personal information just like adult users," Franken wrote. "These younger users are the most vunerable to predetors on Facebook and the rest of the Internet and it should be impossible for them to inadvertently share their phone numbers and home addresses with anyone." But Frankens figures didn't factor in the unkown number of Facebook users under 13. Other sites that are popular with kids handle it differently. Myspace also requires users to be at least at the age of 13, but like Facebook, it has no practial way to verify that information. Disney.com allows children 12 and under to surf the site, and collects some personal information from them before they are eligable to particapate in competitions, for example: Yahoo! doesn't allow kids under 12 or younger to register without the consent of a parent. Like Disney, it collects some limited identifying information for particapation in competitions and similar interactive features.