Facebook
has loosened its privacy rules for teenagers as a rising debate swirls
over online threats to children from bullies and sexual predators.
The
move, announced Wednesday, allows teenagers to post status updates,
videos and images that can be seen by anyone, not just their friends or
people who know their friends.
While Facebook
described the change as giving teenagers, ages 13 to 17, more choice,
big money is at stake for the company and its advertisers. Marketers are
keen to reach impressionable young consumers, and the more public
information they have about those users, the better they are able to
target their pitches.
"It's all about
monetization and being where the public dialogue is," said Jeff Chester,
executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a group that
lobbies against marketing to children. "To the extent that Facebook
encourages people to put everything out there, it's incredibly
attractive to Facebook's advertisers."
But
that public dialogue now includes youths who are growing up in a world
of social media and, often, learning the hard way that it can be full of
risks. Parents, too, are trying to help their children navigate the
raucous online world that holds both promise and peril.
"They're
hitting kids from a neurological weak spot. Kids don't have the same
kind of impulse control that adults do," said Emily Bazelon, a
journalist and author of the book "Sticks and Stones: Defeating the
Culture of Bullying and Rediscovering the Power of Character and
Empathy."
Facebook said numerous other sites
and mobile apps, from big players like Twitter and Instagram to
lesser-known ones like ask.fm and Kik Messenger, allowed teenagers to
express themselves publicly.
"Across the Web,
teens can have a very public voice on those services, and it would be a
shame if they could not do that on Facebook," Nicky Jackson Colaco,
Facebook's manager of privacy and public policy, said in a phone
interview.
But unlike those other services,
Facebook requires users to post under their real identities, which some
privacy advocates said would make it much more difficult to run away
from stupid or thoughtless remarks.
"It's
risky to have teenagers posting publicly," Bazelon said. "The kids who
might be the most likely to do that might not have the best judgment
about what they post."
Facebook also said it
had made the change to let its most knowledgeable users - socially
active teenagers like musicians and humanitarian activists - reach a
wider audience the way they can on blogs and rival services like
Twitter.
Facebook changed another aspect of
its rules for teenagers, for which it drew praise. By default, new
accounts for teenagers will be set up to share information only with
friends, not friends of friends as before. Colaco said the company would
also educate teenagers about the risks of sharing information and
periodically remind them, if they
make public posts that everyone can see what they are sharing.
But fundamentally, Facebook wants to encourage more public sharing, not less.
The
company, which has about its 1.2 billion users worldwide, is locked in a
battle with Twitter and Google to attract consumer advertisers like
food, phone and clothing companies. Those brands want to reach people as
they engage in passionate public conversation about sports, television,
news and live events.
Twitter, which has been
emphasizing its virtue as a real-time public platform as it prepares to
make a public offering of stock next month, has been particularly
effective at persuading marketers that it is the best way to reach
audiences talking about the hottest television show or the week's
National Football League games.
Facebook is
reducing children's privacy even as lawmakers are moving in the opposite
direction, grappling with difficult issues like online bullying and the
question of whether to allow people to erase their digital histories.
In September, a 12-year-old Florida girl, Rebecca Ann Sedwick, committed
suicide after extensive online bullying on Facebook, Kik Messenger and
ask.fm. This month, Florida authorities charged two youngsters with
aggravated stalking in the case.
Gov. Jerry
Brown of California recently signed a law that allows residents to erase
online indiscretions posted while they were teenagers. And European
lawmakers are preparing to vote on changes that would give European
residents far more control over their online privacy.
In
Britain, one of Facebook's largest international markets, local
policymakers have highlighted how social networking sites have been used
to target children for either sexual grooming or online bullying.
About
half of online child sexual exploitation now occurs on social networks,
said Peter Davies, chief executive of the Child Exploitation and Online
Protection Center, a British government body.
"Facebook
is a major one but not the only one," Davies told British politicians
Tuesday. "The medium is not to blame, the medium might be managed
better, so that it is safer for its users. What is to blame is human
behavior."
British lawmakers also are focusing on the online bullying of children after a series of prominent cases.
Facebook
has encountered controversy over its privacy policies in the past and
is now facing additional scrutiny from the Federal Trade Commission,
which is conducting an inquiry into other proposed changes to the
company's privacy policies. Those policies would give Facebook automatic
permission to take a user's post, including a post made by a teenager,
and turn it into an advertisement broadcast to anyone who could have
seen the original post.
Privacy advocates have
complained to the FTC that, with those proposals, Facebook was
violating a 2011 order that required the company to obtain explicit
permission from its customers before using their data in advertising.
Facebook said it still had certain privacy safeguards in place for
teenagers that make it harder for strangers to search and find them, but
it declined to be more specific.
