Insatiable Mark Zuckerberg. After creating the most used social network in the world, which is booming towards one billion subscribers (should be reached by 2012) and is just entered the realm of Wall Street (third largest IPO in the history of the New York Stock Exchange), still wants to broaden its horizons.
Going to conquer a delicate but by no means trivial market: that of the under 13s. In fact, it is known that adolescents now use mobile phones and the Internet with a familiarity that rivals previous generations, even if the question has always raised significant ethical-educational problems, such as the protection of privacy and the risk of spreading messages violent or pornographic.
But Zuckerberg knows one more than the devil, and would therefore be studying one formula that allows under 13s to access Facebook under the watchful eye of their parents. “It is now clear – explains the Californian company to the WSJ – how difficult it is to enforce age restrictions on the web. We are working to ensure that this limit can be cleared through customs, provided that maximum safety is guaranteed and parental control is ensured". In fact, it is known that, in order to enroll, young people tend to lie about their age, thus violating the law and escaping parental control. Already currently, in fact, in some Western countries such as France for example, it has been calculated that two out of three under 13s have a Facebook profile, 75% have a mobile phone and 83% download music from the internet. Nothing more greedy for the "shark" Zuckerberg.
The find, revealed by the Wall Street Journal, will be realized through a system that will allow you to connect the child's account to that of the parent, who will thus be able to choose who to give friendship to and which applications to accept, displaying the main activities carried out by the boy. However, the operation is particularly delicate, because the laws on internet access for minors differ from country to country, but Facebook has already announced that it will modulate the system according to the various impositions.
