Frequent Slashdot Contributor Bennett Haselton writes "Last month Facebook had to submit to some ritualistic lashing when New York Attorney General Cuomo accused them of misrepresenting the site’s safety features and exposing minors to sexual predators — thus making it official that "Facebook is the new MySpace". Facebook did agree to make some concessions, mainly responding faster to abuse reports. But would this make any difference, when anyone who loses their account can sign up for a new one instantly?

What kind of contact do they think the social networking sites should prohibit between adults and minors? .i feel the sites should block adults and minors from messaging each other unethically at all?

Second, if the site does try to monitor for inappropriate contact between adults and minors, is there any practical way to stop someone from falsely signing up as a minor? Third, if someone’s account is cancelled for inappropriate behavior, what good does that do when they can just create another one?

What if Facebook blocked adults from contacting minors at all? Before, I would have assumed that Facebook would respond to this suggestion by saying that it was too draconian, that nobody had ever seriously tried to outlaw all contact between minors and adults on the Internet, etc. But Facebook’s Chief Privacy Officer appeared at one point to endorse this policy as reasonable, by saying that, well; they did block adults from messaging minors on the site, even though they didn’t.

Facebook’s current screening system is that anyone who registers as a high school student has to be confirmed by an existing student at that school, by sending them a friend request and having them confirm that you are friends. This is another recent change that Facebook made that was not listed in their settlement agreement — previously, the Attorney General had documented that anybody under 18 could sign up and join a high school network, but now, you can’t do this without getting another student to confirm you.

Facebook could conceivably require real-world verification for anyone who signed up as a minor — confirmation from their school, for example. But this would be competitive suicide for any site whose main draw is that everybody wants to go there because everybody else is already there, so they need signups to be as easy as possible.

Finally, if Facebook does cancel your account, you can always sign up for a new one instantly with a new e-mail address. Losing your Facebook account might be a harsh punishment for someone who had built up an extensive network of contacts around their profile. But I’ll bet that any adult with a network of friends on Facebook, built around a profile that gives their real name and employer, is probably using a secondary profile with a lot less information on it.

So there’s really nothing that Facebook or any other social-networking site could do to prevent adults from signing up as minors, to prevent adults and minors from messaging each other, or to keep abusers from creating new accounts.