Full Q&A with Chris Kelly

Facebook has accepted that it has a role to play in protecting children who use the site, but said that parents too must take responsibility for their children’s safety.

“There are multiple layers of responsibility and the core for us is to provide the tools that will be effective at protecting kids,” Chris Kelly, the website’s chief privacy officer, said.

Parents must also take a lead in teaching their children how to use the internet safely, he said: “One of the things that you have to do is educate kids not to meet anyone that they only know online, and to tell their parents where they’re going and what they’re doing, and have the parents be an active participant in their lives.”

A Home Office report published today called on social networking sites, including Facebook, to protect the privacy of younger members and provide them with simple ways to report inappropriate behaviour. It also proposed that known paedophiles should be forced to hand over their e-mail addresses so that social networks could bar them.

Mr Kelly said that Facebook already encourages members to report suspicious activities and allows them to customise privacy settings. A recent revision to the site’s privacy policy allowed users to fine tune controls, granting some friends full access to their profile while providing others with more limited information.

“We’ve had a lot more rules in place and a lot more controls in place than I think we’ve generally got credit for,” he said. “We’ve always had reporting links in place for people to say ‘this person shouldn’t be a member of this network’, for example a high-school network, and we do regularly remove people for that.”

Facebook establishes separate networks for under 18s and over 18s, preventing contact between the two groups. It also limits membership to people aged 13 and over, although Mr Kelly acknowledged that the absence of an effective online proof-of-age tool limited the site’s ability to police its age policies.

He said that the site also employs security tools to detect what he described as “anomalous behaviour”, including spam, phishing and other online crimes as well as inappropriate contact between children and adults.

Social networking websites have attracted criticism from some child safety campaigners and government regulators. Andrew Cuomo, the attorney general of New York, described them last year as “a magnet for those who prey on the young”.

Following a report by Mr Cuomo published in October last year, Facebook introduced a more robust system for dealing with complaints about nudity and predatory behaviour on the website.

Despite the risks present on the internet, Mr Kelly said that many parents’ fears were exacerbated by their lack of knowledge about social networking in general and Facebook in particular.

“There is a lot of misunderstanding, particularly about the way that our site is operated versus a lot of others,” he said. “The constant refrain is that you put something up and it’s available to everyone, and that’s never been the case with Facebook.”

Explore Tech & Web News

• Personal Tech

• The Web

• Gadgets & Gaming

Times recommends

• The future of social networking: mobile phones
• Emo on the web: exploring a subculture
• GTA IV shakes it like a Harlem queen