Voluntary Guidelines for Social Networking websites in UK
3rd April London, the Home Office in the UK published guidelines for providers of social networking services, such as Facebook, MySpace and Bebo. The guidelines identify the risks to children in their use of social networking , they provide a code of conduct for the industry, and they also give some practical advice for children, parents and educators.
The code of practice is voluntary. The guidelines are a series of 'recommendations' that industry are asked to consider: there is no sanction for companys that fail to comply or acknowledgement of those who fully-adopt the guidelines. "I strongly urge industry providers to consider the recommendations in the guidance" Home Secretary, Jacqui Smyth says in the foreword.
The global nature of the Internet combined with the sheer volume of content it contains has for a long time presented difficulties for national governments to enforce its regulations on web-based serviced providers. The difficulties in regulting the internet has led to a huge gulf in the standards applied to content and advertising on internet and traditional media such as radio and television.
The fact that most of our children spend most of their time online using a small amount of websites provides unprecedented opportunities for governments to intervene to make their experience of the Internet safer. We must accept that it is impossible to restrict the availability of inappropriate content on the Internet. Content can be hosted in multiple jurisdictions and can easily be moved between jurisdictions to avoid controls. However services like Bebo, MySpace, MSN etc. are where most children spend most of their time. By focusing on influencing this small number of services, governments can have a significant impact on how children experience the Internet. This initative by the Home Office in the UK is an attempt to encourage these sites to adopt practices to protect their young users. Encouragement and gentle persuasion are the only tools available to them at the moment.
The guidelines are organised into 10 categories, with recommendations listed for each category. Below, the categories are listed and I've chosen a sample recommended practice in each category:
1. Safety Information, Awareness and Education by Service Providers - Make safety information available during the registration process, prominent from the homepage and in appropriate places within the service (e.g. in a welcome email/message).
2. Editorial responsibility - Ensure that advertising displayed on social networking services should be appropriate
for the likely audience, to the extent known. If a service is aimed at, or likely to attract, users under the age of 18, providers must follow relevant local guidelines or codes for advertising to minors.
3. Registration - Set the default for full profiles to ‘private’ or to the user’s approved contact list for those registering under the age of 18.
4. User profile and controls - Be careful not to encourage users, especially those under the age of consent, to disclose excessive personal data. Consider carefully what data fields are appropriate.
5. Search - Take steps to ensure that private profiles of users under the age of 18 are not searchable (unless the user actively consents for their profile to be searchable), either on the service or via search engines.
6. Content screening and moderation - Consider offering users an option to approve or pre-moderate comments which may be displayed on their individual site or to restrict the posting of comments only to ‘confirmed friends’.
7. Identity Authentication and Age Verification - Consider using available age-verification systems to verify that users accessing dedicated adult content or services, for example pornography or gambling, are aged 18 or over, such as:
• a credit card check;38
• PIN numbers; and
• proof of account ownership.
8. Responsible use and managing bullying and other forms of abuse via communications technology - Inform users how to:
• block individuals entirely or remove people from their ‘friends’ list;
• use ‘ignore’ functions or similar tools;
• use moderation tools which allow users to pre-screen comments and limit other users’ access to specific content, e.g. photo album; and
• remove unwanted comments or content from their personal pages and, where possible, remove comments they have posted to other people’s pages.
9. Reporting concerns, abuse and illegal behaviour - Have in place clear and straightforward reporting mechanisms for users (in particular for children and young people) to report suspected abuse.
10. Relationships between service providers and law enforcement - Continue to research, develop and test ways of detecting potentially illegal and/or suspicious behaviour towards children online.
Click here to download the full guidelines
Simon Grehan 10 April 2008