You Can’t See a Non-Friend’s Age on Facebook: Alleged Predators Might Not Know Who They’re Contacting

When you’re talking about sexual predators online — and it seems we always are — Facebook is in the hot seat. New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo’s office found compelling evidence that Facebook did not respond in a timely manner to investigators posing as concerned parents.

But despite the compelling evidence that Facebook was non-responsive to complaints, we still don’t have all the facts about who contacted investigators posing as young girls and why.

As I see it, there are two major issues here:

1. Investigators from the New York Attorney General’s office posing as minors were approached for sex on the site.
2. Facebook was slow to respond to investigators posing as parents who were concerned about their children being harassed.

The latter issue is a huge deal. Facebook should know better than to respond with anything less than massive concern when it comes to protecting their most vulnerable users. Period. But the former issue raises my eyebrows a bit. Here’s why:

Can you tell how old I am from looking at this?

Pretend that you’re a creep trolling Facebook for cybersex. The picture was taken when I was 19. But I could be 17. Or I could be 24. It’s a tiny picture. You really can’t tell.

A decent person would probably ask first. No wait, a decent person wouldn’t go around sending out sexually laced e-mails to people they don’t know. But random sexual harassment of adult women and random sexual harassment of teenagers are two different kettles of fish.

The former is creepy and illegal, but women know how to handle ourselves. When we get a message like that, we’re appropriately creeped out, take the appropriate steps to protect ourselves and get on with our lives. The latter is creepy, illegal and predatory because — as we all know/remember — teenagers don’t always exercise stellar judgment.

But we don’t know which of the above situations was actually in effect here.

I’m not defending sexual predators. But nobody in Cuomo’s office has shown us what these alleged predators saw. Were they in the same network as the girls in question? Were they able to see the girl’s birth date or were they only able to see a mini-profile photo like the one above? Did the photo leave any doubt as to the age of the person being contacted?

I have no doubt that there are some pedophiles out there using Facebook. But if we’re going to have a MySpace-style freakout over the issue, we need to be completely sure of the size and nature of the problem we’re dealing with.

As Chuq Von Rospach wrote:

The predator problem, to me, is more publicity than problem (and frankly, where Cuomo is concerned, that seems to happen a lot — he doesn’t seem to be as interested in solving serious problems as sending press releases about problems that generate lots of publicity…)

But regardless, Facebook needs to be way more responsive.

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