Independent assessment of Safer Social Networking Principles

The European Commission published the findings of an independent assessment of the implementation of the "Safer Social Networking Principles for the EU", a self-regulatory agreement signed in 2009 by 20 companies running sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Tuenti, StudiVZ  or Netlog. The report is based on testing of these sites, in order to check whether minors' profiles are private by default or searchable through common search engines, as well as the possibility of changing privacy settings, blocking other users or deleting unwanted content from their profiles.

According to the findings social networking sites have taken action to "empower users" and "encourage safe use approach to Privacy", as well as to "Raise awareness" of their users regarding online safety issues.However, for the Principles related to "age-appropriate services" and "easy to use mechanisms for reporting violations" it was concluded that the compliance between what the signatories stated they did in terms of online safety of their minor users and what is observed on the service itself was the lowest.

To create the report the Commission hired a team of 2 lead researchers and 13 national researchers with background experience in the field of youngsters' usage/knowledge of Internet/new technologies. These researchers tested 25 websites run by the following 20 signatories: Arto, Bebo, Dailymotion, Facebook, Giovani.it, YouTube (Google), Hyves, Xbox Live (Microsoft), Windows Live (Microsoft), MySpace, Nasza-klaza.pl, Netlog, One.lt, Piczo, Ratee , Skyrock, SchulerVZ (VZnet), StudiVZ (VZnet), meinVZ (VZnet), Habbo Hotel (Sulake), IRC Galleria (Sulake), Tuenti , Yahoo!Answers, Yahoo!Flickr and Zap.lu.

The first part of the test was analyzing the self-declarations submitted by all the signatories explaining their individual safety policies. Using a standard questionnaire, which was the basis for the testing of the sites, researchers then tested all 25 sites in their respective language (Tuenti was tested in Spanish, Rate in Estonian etc).

Acting as a 11 year old or a 15 year old child the researchers investigated various safety related tasks such as finding safety tips for children, ease of blocking unwanted contacts, the ability to remove posts and pictures from their profile and finding out who can see the child's profile. They also sent a request for help to the site in order to analyse the response time and answer content.

You can find an overall summary report and test reports per signatory online. All individual reports are available in English, and in the main language of the sites tested at http://ec.europa.eu/saferinternet