Gillian McArthur, 48, was shocked when she found that Bebo and Facebook had age restrictions. Her son Oliver, 13, had been on Bebo for three years and on Facebook a year by the time she found out that he should not have been on either.

“I was astonished and slightly annoyed. How could Oliver and all his friends have been on there all this time and it is not being policed?” she said.

As a user of Facebook herself, Ms McArthur, an architect from Norwich, said she was concerned that she had not noticed the age restriction when she joined. “It is very much in the small print. I ticked the terms and conditions box but like most other people I didn’t go through them.”

She said that if she had found out before Oliver had turned 13 she would have been in a dilemma and would not necessarily have ordered him to take down his profile.

“All his friends are on there so I would not have immediately ordered him to get off. These are the moral judgments parents are having to make these days. It might make life easier if the sites were policed more robustly.”

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