http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-21606768

In this case the family should block Facebook. Though the problems that are highlighted do need addressing.


Also why haven't the police arrested that man?

But that's one family. Countless teens and preteens are using the site. So are paedos. Why are we making things easier for them?

Yes I do accept that, Facebook are not faultless in this case. Far too many kids and as such perfect for paedophiles. Though unless you block all kids it will remain a problem.

Surely it's the parent's responsibility to monitor what their child is doing on the computer? There's a limit to what websites can do. If they had to manually verify every user and check every comment, they'd need a million staff and simply couldn't operate.

It's not just Facebook. There's many similar social sites, the most obvious being MySpace which has been around a long time now. Probably most of the people on there joined when they were young.

I was even on a dating site "OKcupid" and one of the "your match" emails was for a 13 year old girl. I was 40. My response was to block her so it wouldn't happen again. Her profile said she was 18, but in her description she said she had lied to join the site.

To be fair most families have no idea what their kids get up on the computers and if the computer were in a family room then they would have more chance of stopping such behaviour. In addition there are ways of locking down computers so that they are restricted to certain hours but I would imagine that most parents are clueless about how to do so. I would admit that I fall into that category, but then since I live alone and am the only user it is not really an issue.


Chances are that it could be an under cover cop, though still best to block. Though maybe you should also have reported her to the site.

Having been a teenager with a computer in a communal area, I know it's easy enough to hide windows when parents walk past, and that was when it took a couple of seconds for a window to minimise! A lot of parents lack the skills to set up parental controls, and those that can will get frustrated when they themselves are caught out by them.

Hiding windows is easy especially if you can see and hear people coming. Yes parental controls are next to useless if you have to get the kids to set them up. Though how many people actually have different user accounts set up and a sole admin accounts so that they can manage access?